Community must focus sooner on children’s mental health

Monday, Dec. 28, 2015 | 2 a.m.

The lives of children afflicted with mental illness are likely to take a downward spiral unless there is early intervention — and the sooner, the better.

The longer a child’s mental and emotional health issues go unchecked, the greater the consequences. Acting out at home can grow into misbehavior in school, then delinquency in the community that ends up being addressed in court. Or a child’s depression, if unnoticed and untreated, can grow increasingly dark as his or her self-esteem plummets, feeding thoughts if not decisions to commit suicide.

As many as 70 percent of adolescents in Nevada’s juvenile justice system have a mental disorder, experts estimate. Similar estimates are issued nationwide.

In a five-part series “Children in Crisis,” published in our sister publication the Las Vegas Sun, reporter Jackie Valley introduced us to a 13-year-old she called Colby. He had been taken to UMC’s children’s hospital 25 times before landing in front of a Family Court judge, accused of running recklessly through the streets, throwing rocks at vehicles and trying to harm his mother. There were compelling reasons to get Colby medical treatment, but there were problems with insurance and difficulties finding a psychiatric hospital or a private residential center that had space, or was willing, to accept him. So Colby was sent home, and a month later, he was back in court.

Complicating the treatment of troubled children is that it’s not easy to spot budding emotional or mental issues, whether they are organic or brought on by a traumatic event. A disturbed child might be perceived by his parents or teachers as a livewire — rambunctious, burning off energy, discovering his boundaries. And the chemical issues that can hijack parts of a child’s brain can be difficult to diagnose.

Take the case of 15-year-old Leo, who had been seen by more than 30 medical professionals since he was 4 and had been variously diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, bipolar conduct disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorder and depression. His mother wondered: How do you treat something if you don’t know what it is?

Children are in crisis. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nationally, as many as 1 in 5 children ages 3 to 17 experiences a mental disorder any given year. Surveys in Nevada show that a third of the state’s adolescents reported being anxious or depressed. One in 4 middle-school students say they have seriously considered suicide, and half of those have tried to kill themselves.

At a public forum cosponsored by the Sun and the Lincy Institute at UNLV, parents and a panel of experts discussed Nevada’s shortcomings in helping troubled children and their families. Chief among them: There’s a desperate need for more mental health professionals in Nevada. The state already is notoriously lacking in doctors, and it’s especially true within the mental health field. The situation is more dire still among those who specialize in children. Nevada also lacks social workers, counselors and therapists trained in pediatric mental health.

The solution? Gov. Brian Sandoval, state legislators and grant writers must find money to hire more mental health professionals in the Department of Health and Human Services, and pursue grants to bolster the ranks of therapists and counselors in schools.

If we don’t better deal with our children’s mental and emotional disturbances at the earliest possible time, the more young adults we’ll see in later years standing before a judge — if they even survive to that age.