HALF TEENS IN U.S. MEET MENTAL DISORDER CRITERIA - CRAZY!

Uploaded by theGlobalReport on 22 Oct 2010

From Agence France Presse: Researchers with the National Institutes of Mental Health have found that around half of American teens meet the criteria for a mental disorder and nearly one in four report having a mood, behavior or anxiety disorder that interferes with daily life.
The study, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry finds fifty-one percent of boys and 49 percent of girls aged 13-19 have a mood, behavior, anxiety or substance use disorder.
In 22.2 percent of teens, the disorder was so severe it impaired their daily activities and caused great distress.
The study says: "The prevalence of severe emotional and behavior disorders is even higher than the most frequent major physical conditions in adolescence, including asthma or diabetes."
Mental problems do not get the same attention from public health authorities even though they cost US families around a quarter of a trillion dollars a year.
Study leader Kathleen Merikangas and a team of researchers analyzed data from the National Comorbidity Study-Adolescent Supplement, which surveyed more than 10,000 US teens.
The study is the first to track the prevalence of a broad range of mental disorders in a nationally representative sample of US teens.
They found that nearly a third of the teens met the criteria for the most common mental disorder among US youth, anxiety disorders, which include social phobia and panic "attacks".
This class of disorder also had the earliest median onset age, occurring in children as young as six years old.
Teen mental disorder rates mirror those seen in adults, suggesting that most adults develop a mental disorder before adulthood, say the researchers, calling for earlier intervention and prevention, and more research to determine what the risk factors are for mental disorders in youth