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Children's Mental Health Is A Minefield

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You've probably heard some alarming numbers, like that 7.5 percent of U.S. children between the ages of 6 and 17 are taking ADHD medication. That's a pretty worrying figure. But do you know what's equally worrying? Eleven percent of all U.S. children have been diagnosed with ADHD.

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We're not great with math, but we're pretty sure there's a bit of a gap there. A gap filled with sick children -- the worst gap this side of the one at the outlet mall, which only sells jeans with one leg.

While an estimated 10 percent of children have some serious form of mental health problem, only about half of them are receiving treatment from an appropriately trained therapist. Another 10 percent of children have less serious issues, and their neglect can be even greater. For example, an estimated 60 percent of children with diagnosable depression and 80 percent of kids with anxiety disorders aren't receiving any treatment. Roughly half of all lifetime mental health issues begin by age 14. To further depress you, studies have found that treatment works super well for young people, but becomes increasingly less effective the longer you wait to receive it.

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Psychiatry Has A Deep Racial Bias

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Black patients are diagnosed with schizophrenia up to 2.5 times as often as white ones. So what's going on here? Do black people, as a racist '90s stand-up comic would say, "just be crazy"?

Of course not. It even works the other way around: Studies have found that black people are less likely to be diagnosed with milder mood disorders, basically getting involuntary upgrades to full-on psychotic diagnoses instead.

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Here's the thing: The medical field was pretty complicit in the whole "Let's justify black inferiority so we can continue slavery" thing, back in the 19th century. Bits and pieces of that old brick wall survive even today. In psychology, this manifests in both physicians' tendency to misdiagnose and black patients' relative unwillingness to seek treatment unless the condition is extremely serious. One feeds the other, in a never-ending, twisted, psychological daisy chain of injustice.

And even if they decide to spin the roulette wheel of mental health, hoping the ball lands on "reasonable treatment for my depression" instead of "dragged away screaming by men in white," black folks are still out of luck. One study had voice actors leave messages with over 300 therapists -- one group of actors portrayed black people, and another portrayed white people. Middle-class black women were 30 percent less likely to get called back than white women. With men, it was 60 percent. With working-class women and men, the likelihood to receive a callback was 70 percent and 80 percent lower, respectively, for the black test subjects.

2

Prenatal Depression Is Largely Ignored

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We have a deeply ingrained societal belief that pregnancy is a blissful time. Unfortunately, the idea doesn't quite hold up to reality. Research suggests that between 10 and 16 percent of pregnant women suffer symptoms of depression and receive no treatment, likely because most of them are unaware of how common depression during pregnancy is.

Why would they think that? Well, even though we're pretty well versed on depression after childbirth, until very recently doctors believed that the elevated levels of estrogen during pregnancy protected women against pretty much all psychological distress. Wow, estrogen is magical! Where can we get some? We'll shoot it directly into our eyeballs. What can go wrong?

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Unfortunately, estrogen is not actually Huxley's soma -- this is all just willful ignorance. Studies conducted with medical students reinforce this idea, citing that med students often have a bias against treating pregnant women for depression, simply because they are pregnant. Because we, as a society, think pregnancy is a happy time, we just stick our fingers in our ears and yell until we can't hear the sobbing anymore.

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America Is Exporting Its Mental Illnesses

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