Children?s Mental Health Week 2019
Children?s Mental Health Week 2019
Yesterday the 4th February marked the start of Children?s Mental Health week, a national awareness week created with the aim of encouraging children and young people to look after their bodies and their minds. A cause that everyone can get behind. The issue of mental health is one that is prominent in the UK. At present suicide is the biggest killer of young men and women aged 20-34 and it is predicted that 75% of mental illness starts before a child?s 18th birthday. This is why it is so important that mental illness within children is taken seriously from a young age and something is done to raise awareness for the issue.
When thinking of childhood, serious mental health problems don?t usually spring to mind but for 10% of all school children aged between 5-16 it is part of their day to day life and this is only the children that have been officially diagnosed. It is believed that 75% of young people with a mental health problem are not receiving treatment because they are either undiagnosed or there just isn?t help available to them. On average its takes a shocking 10 years for effective treatment to be given to people suffering from mental health as it is often left until they are at crisis point until help is provided to them. The lack of help available and the stigma attached with mental illness has led to the issues we are now facing. It is recorded that 51% of young people are embarrassed by mental illness, this adds to the number of undiagnosed as children are too ashamed to come forward and talk.
The issues of both diagnosis and treatment need to be addressed if we want to see a real change in the way mental health is dealt with. Unfortunately there is no quick easy fixes but charities like Place2Be are working to try and make a real difference to how mental health is perceived in schools by offering help to those that need it. Charities like this are desperately needed as funding for research into mental health is well below what it should be, it equates to just 6% of the UK health research. This means that for every person affected by mental illness, ?8 is spent on research ? 22 times less than cancer and 14 times less than dementia. If anything is taken from this blog I hope it would be a realisation of how desperate the situation is with regards to mental health. Please support this awareness week however you can, ideas of how to do so are here. We have also written other blogs on mental health, for example 5 ways of spotting childhood mental illness, which you can read here.