25% of youths have Mental Problems

I have no experience in the area but I do wonder exactly whose study found that a quarter of all people in Australia classed as young people have a mental health condition?

Is this current opinion in the field of mental health or social work (or whatever)? Or is it the finding of one study?

Deane

quote:

Originally posted by Deane F:
I have no experience in the area but I do wonder exactly whose study found that a quarter of all people in Australia classed as young people have a mental health condition?

actually it's 25% of the population, not the young population, and not just the Australian population. It all comes down to what you want to call a mental health 'condition' - if I recall correctly they include phobias in that count.

This City probably has more psychiatrists & psychologists than most lands, and the child psychologist community just in this Borough alone I suspect outway those of UK, Australia & New Zealand combined ?


Fritz Von If yer let em in they never let go (that's purely my opinion in that non medical options are alsways preferbal unless critical, innit)

Fritz

This is the one thread you should keep out of.

You are as nutty as a fruitcake.

Get a job instead of whinging on here.

Regards

Mick

Our experience bringing up two boys, and sanity checks with other parents with teenagers who confirmed similar experiences, was that even those that are considered well adjusted go through a phase in their mid to late teens when they are in their opinion "misunderstood" by their parents. Very frustrating circular conversations are common along the lines of.

Parents: "what's the problem do you want to talk about it?"
Child: "No you would'nt understand"
Parents: calmly not shouting "well if you explained it a little maybe we could try to understand!"
Child: "I can't explain it to you, you would'nt understand"

...and round in circles we go.

For one of my sons working in his University holidays a "parent" only known through work, and otherwise not involved with our family bacame an inadvertent mentor to my son & his problems. The guy concerned was sensible enough to meet with us "offline" and explain the direction this was taking. We agreed a response approach between us which was a mix of the guys commonsense and historic information provided by us. My son listened to him giving advice which he would not have "heard" if it had come from us.

Point of story.
A Mentor can play a very influential role but at the same time takes on a big responsibility since his/her guidance could be taken up as "gospel" by the troubled youths. Obviously there are histories and backgrounds to each case which vary enormously. For those from a disadvantaged or violent family background where no understanding was ever attempted or possible, any sensible help is perhaps beneficial. For those from a more egalitarian family with genuine care and intelligence in their upbringing, who are rebelling or suffering depression for a variety of reasons, it is dangerous to become the font of advice and understanding without some insight into the background and perhaps consultation.

regards
GEOFF

quote:

Originally posted by Mick Parry:
Fritz

This is the one thread you should keep out of.

You are as nutty as a fruitcake.

Get a job instead of whinging on here.

Regards

Mick

You know not what you speak Oh Great Grinder !

I think the environment plays a major factor, European society is generally quite different from those of Australia & New Zealand.


Fritz Von I do have a lot of personal experience in this matter, but don't think this is the right place to talk about it, give advice, or any other such commentary's. Cheers,
so I'll leave this thread, and go find me a rich woman instead.

25% of youths have mental problems?

I'm not surprised – have you heard the shit they listen to?

Kevin

quote:

Originally posted by Lomo:
Here in Australia it is now considered that a quarter of our young people have a mental health condition.

What does "mental health condition" mean? And how has it been diagnosed?

Young people are odd. It is normal. We grow out of it, don't we?

Parry you an expert on this as well. Mind you an ex-manager its probably required before promotion.

quote:

instead of whinging on here

Pot,kettle,calling, black, the (re-arrange into a well known phrase or saying.

H

Guys
I worked as a registered psychiatric nurse for over 18 years. I finished back in 1991 due to the politics that went on in the health service at the time, but that’s another story.

Suffice to say that I don’t think the figures have increased that much over the past 14 years since I left, with people suffering from mental health problems. It comes in many forms and I think statistics from twenty years ago state that 1 in 5 of us will suffer some mental health problems in our lifetime, whether that is stress, anxiety, depression, or full blown psychosis. We use different labels now than in the past, so its more obvious, but people have always suffered from these problems, they’ve just haven’t been called illnesses before.

There is still a stigma attached to anyone suffering from mental illness, even if it’s depression, and it does conjure up fear in the general public. Be honest how many of you would feel uncomfortable if someone who was acting strangely by talking to himself at a bus stop, and then started asking you silly questions?

Mental health has always been the Cinderella service in our NHS with underfunding and poor management. I’m sure things have changed over the years but not all change is for the better, especially the programs to shut down the big institutions and relocate people into the community. Many of the long term patients who had spent the best part of their lives in these places, were then placed into residential care homes. The majority never wanted to go and a large percentage of them died within 12 months of relocation. It always seemed a bit cruel to me, moving people from what had been their homes.

One in ten people will have a serious enough mental health problem in their lifetime to need psychiatric care and 1 in 5, at least, will find that their emotional problems give them a significant burden in life. I expect that figure includes at least some of us here, so its not helpful to bandy around stereotypical labels. People with mental health problems are not a different section of humanity – its all of us, potentially.


Regards
Clive

Who was it that said that psychiatry is at the same stage now that surgery was when it was practiced by barbers?

Ronnie Laing, back in the 60's, questioned the place of psychiatry in the field of medicine. After all, he said, what other branch of medicine treats patients on the basis of conduct alone? What other branch of medicine sometimes enforces treatment against patient consent on the basis of conduct alone? What other branch of medicine imprisons patients on the basis of conduct alone? Looked at that way psychiatry bears more similarity to politics.

DSM I, II, III, IV and soon V. Look back into the old manuals and you'll find psychiatry once considered some very odd things to be pathological. Homosexuality, for example, is now recognised by the law as normal but not long ago was a mental disorder.

Things that make you go hmmmm?

Deane

________________________________________________
[QUOTE]Originally posted by cunningplan

Suffice to say that I don’t think the figures have increased that much over the past 14 years
________________________________________________
Clive, totally agree with you. However, if we accept that 'mental illness' is as much/more to do with a reaction to intolerable life stresses than any pathological factor (Deane mentions the radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing, who made this his central thesis) then, as the world becomes an ever more stressful place to live (war, environmental disaster, unemployment etc...) more and more people will succumb to this stress.
Working in present day mental health services, the vast majority of the clientele I deal with are ordinary people who are just completly ground down and have lost the ability to cope. We 'treat' patients (i.e. dope them up with medication) and then discharge them back into the same depressing circumstances that led to their initial 'illness'.

Malky
Yes you're quite right, not much has changed in that respect, they're medicated and discharged, only to get into the revolving door situation of constant re-admissions. However, this applies to the people with a significant mental illness (since the psychiatric services only see people who meet a certain level of problem, either to themselves, others or society).

The rest of the population with "mental health problems" are not seen by the psychs at all.
My wife who is a GP sees most of these people as she is their primary contact. She is seeing more and more people who turn to their GP rather than their family, friends / priest etc, and the sufferings of normal life are becoming regarded as illness, not just things to cope with. Grief is a prime example - people expect not to feel it, but to have a pill to take away the distress - which is actually a normal reaction to an admittedly painful experience, but hardly an illness. Emotional reactions to marital breakup is another example - how can they expect not to feel something when life starts falling apart around them.

Perhaps peoples expectations of what they are prepared to put up with have changed. And whilst I accept that modern life is stressful, the last generation didn't have it too easy either - its only relatively recently that parents could expect all their children to survive into adulthood, or know that (unless they chose to join the forces), they would not end up dead in a war. Maybe with all today's modern conveniences, we now have time for stress, whereas before survival took up most of our physical and emotional energy? Much of the suffering in the world today is real, but its not often personal to us, and getting stressed by it seems to me to be a luxury. Our stresses are rather different to those in the third world, or war zones.

BTW, psychiatric patients are sometimes treated for the behaviour they exhibit, but in fact its often much more true that they are treated for the very distressing symptoms they themselves suffer. Anyone who has seen an acutely psychotic patient will know that it would be cruel in the extreme not to try and help someone experiencing it.

Regards
Clive

I was reading a health magazine yesterday. The head of psychiatry at a large regional hospital suggested that most obese kids suffer from depression and very low self-esteem.

Unlike Dr M Parry, I am not qualified to assess whether the 25% of the population who are obese and have mental problems are also counted in with the 25% of the general population who suffer mental problems, but may not be obese.

Despite the very large numbers of people affected, it's just another tabu subject. Typical of our attitude to sexual problems, alcoholism, drug taking, obesity, death and cancer.

As in: We don't really want to go there, do we?

Nime

The Australian Childrens Health Institutes Director quoted these figures.
She also said they are on the increase and that unless we can do something to alleviate the problem it is likely to become an epidemic.
Main worry is the number of very young children now affected and the fact is that the majority are not growing out of it. It is probably no surprise that the largest group for drug taking is 20 to 35. They also provide the greatest suicide rate. Statistics are also provided by the UK and the same trend is happening there.
Young females are becoming more aggressive and this is being translated into higher crime rates. I went to childrens matinees at the movies recently and sat through two childrens animated films. One was Shrek 2 and the other Lemony Snickett. What I noticed is that kids are not laughing anymore. In fact the latter film was to my mind not suitable for young children. Not picking on Hollywood but are kids these days having any old fashioned fun.

quote:

Originally posted by Lomo:
The Australian Childrens Health Institutes Director quoted these figures.
She also said they are on the increase and that unless we can do something to alleviate the problem it is likely to become an epidemic.
Main worry is the number of very young children now affected and the fact is that the majority are not growing out of it. It is probably no surprise that the largest group for drug taking is 20 to 35. They also provide the greatest suicide rate. Statistics are also provided by the UK and the same trend is happening there.
Young females are becoming more aggressive. I went to childrens matinees at the movies recently and sat through two childrens animated films. One was Shrek 2 and the other Lemony Snickett. What I noticed is that kids are not laughing anymore. In fact the latter film was to my mind not suitable for young children. Not picking on Hollywood but are kids these days having any old fashioned fun.

Lomo

I'm not advancing these reflections and questions as anything but an alternative, albeit cynical, possiblity:

Is the Australian Childrens Health Institute publically funded? Whose figures were quoted by the Director? I'm afraid I don't trust bureaucrats whose jobs depend on the contributions from the public purse justifying their existence by quoting slightly shocking sstatistics.

An "epidemic" of mental health problems? For a start the use of the word implies infectiousness and an incidence of one in four (or more) would be pandemic. The only conclusion to be drawn from the suggestion that the problem will get worse is that the causative factors are environmental. If that is true the only effective way to address the problem would be to remake society from the ground up.

The claims are the more believable because the concerned group seems to see itself as a different class of people than the affected group. The tone of the claims are a little paternalistic to my mind. I sympathise with Germaine Greer's assertions in "Sex and Destiny" that in the West we hate our children.

"Young females are becoming more aggressive " I'd suggest that if that is true then its predictive of better outcomes for them in society rather than a problem. "...and this is being translated into higher crime rates " This is just too raw and simple to be believable. More, much more, information is needed before this is a credible statement especially if money is going to be thrown at intervention strategies.

"are kids these days having any old fashioned fun." Do you mean "unsophisticated fun"?

Deane

I take your points on board Deane and yes, funding for this organisation does come from the public. If you wish to be pedantic an epidemic is "a disease spreading rapidly through a community for a period". So we could quibble about this.
Have a look at www.ichr.uwa.edu.au to understand what this organisation is doing.
On mentoring I start my training in a couple of weeks. Training is over three days and is about 15 hours in duration. Committment is for at least 6 months with at least 2 hours a fortnight to be spent with the mentee. In addition the mentors support each other with informal BBQs and the like held at regular intervals. The scheme has been going in our area since 1998. Once started confidentialty restrictions kick in which is only right and proper. Please understand that the mentees do not necessarily have a mental health problem. A lot of young people just require someone that they can talk to and receive encouragement from. The mentor is really another support figure in a young person's life. Thanks for your interest. Ian.

Lomo

Will the mentee be a younger person experiencing problems of some kind?

I expect you're nervous?

Deane

The mentees are young people in their middle to late teens althogh I expect that there will also be some from outside this age range. The parents have to sign an approval form and of course the young people have to want to take part. They are referred to the mentor group by other organisations who believe that the mentoring will be of benefit to them and those around them. I am nervous about what lies in store for me but that will apply to both of us.