Today’s Challenges for Children’s Mental Health

My book, Delivered Unto Lions, is centred on an unpleasant aspect of children’s mental health care in 1970s Britian.  We have come a long way since the ’70s, and hopefully today’s services for young people are more compassionate and understanding.   But there remain, even now, a number of challenges that need to be overcome if we are to treat our troubled children and teenagers with proper care and dignity.

The Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition has identified a number of particular challenges, including:

• promoting good mental health in the early years
• tackling the ongoing problem of stigma
• encouraging emotional resilience
• filling the gap in mental health care provision between adolescence and adulthood
• listening to the unheard voices of some children

And there are more.  But I am just going to focus on the issues of stigma and unheard voices.

I have already written about stigma in previous posts.  This is a particular interest of mine as, I believe, it is the stigma of mental health problems that has kept many of the injustices of past psychiatric ‘care’ hidden – a topic that Delivered Unto Lions tries to open up.

The charity YoungMinds wants the UK Government to back a high-profile anti-stigma campaign to be fronted by young people.  There is a fear, however, that in these financially difficult times, the current administration will not want to channel the country’s limited resources into such a campaign.  But stigma and discrimination can have serious consequences for the economy.  If people with problems are made to feel ashamed or guilty because of stigma, then they are less likely to ask for help at an early stage.  And so they will enter the mental health care system much later on when their problems have become worse and more entrenched, needing far more expensive – and often less helpful – specialist treatments.  They will also be likely to have become too unwell to work.

Society’s attitudes to mental health are absorbed by children, and so a lot of anti-stigma work needs to be done in the early years so that future generations are not burdened with the same discriminatory and damaging views of mental health that persist in the present generation.

The issue of ‘unheard voices’ is also of special interest to me.  I am currently a postgraduate student on an archives administration course, and I am especially fascinated by the question of which voices get preserved in archives and which voices get ignored.  Obviously, in centuries gone by, only the wealthy and privileged were literate, so only they were capable of making the records that can still be read today.  The voices of ‘peasants’, however, were not recorded.

Some archives and museums (if they can afford it) are involved in ‘documentation strategies’.  These are efforts to go out and actually record the thoughts and memories of people whose voices might not otherwise be represented in archives.  These are the voices of ‘ordinary’ people and members of minority groups, etc.  For example, as time moves on it is becoming especially important to preserve people’s memories of World War II before it is too late.  We already have governmental and military records, of course, and the writings of important figures, but what was the war like for other people, the people who stayed at home or served the war effort in less obvious ways?

The issue of unheard voices is also very important when it comes to children and mental health services.  My memories of the 1970s suggest that all of us who were child psychiatric patients had difficulty making our voices heard – the ‘powers-that-be’ did not listen to us.  Today it is particular groups of children, rather than children in general, whose voices are not heard (though I imagine that most children have trouble making themselves heard in certain circumstances).  

In adult psychiatric services, Black and African-Caribbean communities are overrepresented.  In 2002, a study found that fear often delays people from an African-Caribbean background in seeking help for their problems.  And so, when they finally do seek help, their problems are often more severe. The (perfectly understandable) fear of both children and parents means that voices don’t get heard by those who could help those who are suffering.  It is only when the problems have become much more serious that those voices get noticed – and sometimes treated very harshly. 

There are many more challenges that our society needs to face with regard to children’s mental health – I’ve just covered two of those issues very briefly.  But if our society is to grow into one that is more healthy and happy, we really must face up to all of these challenges.

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Delivered Unto Lions by David Austin is published by CheckPoint Press.
For more information visit www.davidaustin.eu