Child Psychiatrists Must Lead the Charge in the Youth Mental Health Crisis
We child psychiatrists could be doing more to combat the youth mental health crisis.
We’re trained to provide great care for one child at a time. That’s just not going to be enough.
Gene Beresin MD, MA, a Harvard professor and director of child and adolescent psychiatry training at Mass General Hospital, just said as much.
He and other leading academic child and adolescent psychiatrists (CAPs) from around the country published an article last month in Academic Psychiatry calling for us to work smarter.
We CAPs are uniquely positioned to be champions and effective advocates for systemic change. The last 20 years have taught us that we’re not going to train enough of us to dig out of the worsening youth mental health crisis.
Our profession’s ethical standards call on us to think beyond treatment of individual patients and consider population health. Dr. Beresin and his colleagues are urging us to do the following:
- Reach out to the media and find opportunities to teach communities what we know. Don’t wait until the next school shooting to get on TV.
- Develop peer supervision programs that train young people to help other young people. Youth may be more likely to open up to peers.
- Introduce school-based social emotional learning programs that include therapeutic skill building. There are several proven programs that teach students how to think and talk about emotions.
- Create, study and disseminate online parenting modules and therapy tools. We must find ways to scale effective interventions to everyone who needs them.
We CAPs need to reset and rethink how we’re spending our time and energy. We don’t have a system that works. It’s up to us to do something about it.
Photo Credit: Jack Bell Photography
