MENTAL HEALTH
Article: "Kids Disorders Quantified."
This article, written by Stacy Fins, appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 19, 2014. What follows are excerpts from the actual article:
Nearly 1 in 10 children will be diagnosed with a mental health condition that will require hospitalization, according to a new analysis led by UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. Depression alone accounts for $1.33 billion in annual hospital charges.
The study is the first to examine the regularity and costs connected to specific inpatient mental health diagnoses for children, according to the hospital.
“This is the first paper to give a clear picture of the mental health reasons kids are admitted to hospitals nationally,” said Dr. Naomi Bardach, the lead author on the research and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital. “Mental health hospitalizations have been increasing in kids, up 80 percent in 2010 compared to 1997.”
More than 14 million children and adolescents in the country have a diagnosable mental disorder, yet there was not enough information to determine which ones are causing kids to be hospitalized. Now, researchers have learned that diagnoses of depression, bipolar disorder and psychosis are the most common and expensive pediatric admissions.
Depression accounted for 44.1 percent of admissions, bipolar for 18.1 percent at an annual cost of $702 million, followed by psychosis at 12.1 percent and $540 million a year.
Article: “Go on Medi-Cal to get that”: Why Californians With Mental Illness Are Dropping Private Insurance To Get Taxpayer-Funded Treatment
In dozens of interviews, families, attorneys, judges, therapists and public officials agree: People with serious mental illnesses often do better dropping private insurance and qualifying for taxpayer-funded treatment...
Jocelyn Wiener, CalMatters, Tuesday, August 4, 2020. (reprinted at CapRadio.org).
Article: Detecting depression: Phone apps could monitor teen angst
Rising suicide rates and depression in U.S. teens and young adults have prompted researchers to ask a provocative question: Could the same devices that some people blame for contributing to tech-age angst also be used to detect it? The idea has sparked a race to develop apps that warn of impending mental health crises. Call it smartphone psychiatry, or child psychology 2.0. Studies have linked heavy smartphone use with worsening teen mental health. But as teens scroll through Instagram and Snapchat, tap out texts or watch YouTube videos, they also leave digital footprints that might offer clues to their psychological well-being.
Article: World in mental health crisis of monumental suffering, say experts
Written by Sarah Boseley, Health Editor for The Guardian, published Tuesday, October 9, 2018. The article presents the finding of a team of 28 global experts assembled by the Lancet medical journal, which states that there is a “collective failure to respond to this global health crisis” which “results in monumental loss of human capabilities and avoidable suffering.”