Probably my toxic masculinity showing, but if 1 in 3 children has anxiety, then I'd chalk it up to "that's life". We cannot possibly offer therapy to that many children and medicating the problem away is a chilling suggestion.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
Why not? We expect a healthy child to have a doctor, a healthy child to have a friend group. Why not expect them to have a mental doctor/therapist?
maybe there's value in occasionally seeing a therapist for a "mental health checkup", but weekly one-on-ones obviously doesn't scale to every single child.
An appropriate course of treatment for each child with a diagnosable condition for which it is appropriate certainly does. Maybe weekly sessions 52 weeks a year, every year, for every child regardless of need doesn't, but why would you do that anyway?
Basically for every treatment a certain percentage of patients will get worse, not better. So just like you'd only prescribe drugs when needed due to the risks, prescribing therapy when not needed is a bad idea.
Why not? A 12-16 week course of CBT for even 20% of children, sometime during childhood (so about 1-2% of children per year) would be a rounding error in total healthcare expenditures. It would be a substantial increase in current mental health expenditure, and probably take a several years to get up to capacity for, but its not something radically impossible.
If the source of one's anxieties isn't going to change (like one's neighborhood or family), no amount of coursework or medication is going to help. Exceptional circumstances notwithstanding, there is no way to psychologize, meditate, or drug a kid's problems away. There is no one-size-fits-all solution
I might not have the solution to the problems themselves are, but the chances of proactive intervention damaging a child's life are much higher than if you left them alone. The last thing I would like to see coming back is mass institutionalization, and unfortunately these kinds best-intention suggestions become springboards for later abuses
I've been mentally toying with the idea of an in-house pre-paid school psychologist and mandatory annual screenings for all students. We already do this for hearing and vision screening, and sometimes even dental screening and care.
That or there are other ways to create intervention opportunities. There are many proven mental health therapeutic interventions that could be implemented in a classroom format. Lots of self-journaling to various prompts, etc. The class can focus on stress management strategies, organization, and other sorts of long term planning, reflection, conflict resolution and other life-success skills. Self-assessment quizzes could be administered to screen for depression, anxiety, dark-triad type stuff and then results evaluated by an actual psychologist with appropriate followup as needed. I just about guarantee that would do more to prevent school shootings than any gun control proposals on the table.
For the amount we spend on schools to have school resource officers (like providing extra opportunities for students to have run-ins with the law is helpful?), and all the security and surveillance infrastructure, and ridiculous admin costs, I think it wouldn't be nearly as expensive as you might think.
> Self-assessment quizzes could be administered to screen for depression, anxiety, dark-triad type stuff and then results evaluated by an actual psychologist with appropriate followup as needed.
this part seems misguided. especially if administered through school, I suspect a lot of students would perceive this as an attempt to get them to "tell on" themselves. which it is, at least some of the time.
> This software is too buggy to improve. We should give up and live with the bugs instead?
1. You can do a full costly rewrite, probably still end up with bugs because we don't have a real solution to inherent complexity. (we don't have a cure for anxiety)
2. You can target the few very bad bugs and fix those (helping the ~5% of children with crippling anxiety, let the "moderate" anxiety learn to live with it).
Article is pointing towards doing 1, I think it's ridiculous and how we end with a significant proportion of kids on antidepressants.
Anytime there is a pattern to bugs, I stop and think about the systemic changes that got us there in the first place. And that's what I'm advocating for here too.
That's actually probably a very good and cost effective solution to part of the problem, despite probably being a typo.
No, it's not.
> I think it's ridiculous and how we end with a significant proportion of kids on antidepressants.
The most common treatment for diagnosable childhood anxiety seems to be talk therapy, not medication (and, anti-anxiety and anti-depreasant are different sets of drugs, anyway.)