Childhood Psychiatric Diseases

I think the article was informative and needed. While I recognize there are abuses of systems that are fueled by greed, incompetence, lack of funding, and lack of education, there is also a lot of very good work going on to help children with a variety of mental health problems. There are also many children that do not get the help they need because of stigma, lack of adequate health insurance coverage, and lack of parity of mental health with physical health. Until we make mental illness as high a priority as cancer in research, training, funding, and access to care, there will be horror stories like the above to tell.



We need to not forget that like medicine, psychology, psychiatry, and mental health are developing fields. Therefore, what we do not do well today, we will do better tomorrow. Discussions like these, hopefully, will spur us to continue to search and prod others for better answers.



We must also remember that humans are very complex and answers for their problems will often not lie in one little box and often, not the first box you look in. It will be the combination of physical, mental, environmental, family, and spiritual answers, interventions, and changes that will help big people and little people heal from all kinds of illnesses. This is where one hand can help the other.



Here's to a better tomorrow.

Kathryn Seifert, Ph.D.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost