Common Mental Health Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence (Nursing)

00:00 Mental health in children and youth. We're going to be talking about ACEs which is adverse childhood experiences as well as other mental health issues that we see in children and youth. And it's really important to remember that children and youth are not just small adults. That when we are thinking about mental illness and adverse childhood experiences, we're thinking about the well-being and the development of the healthy child emotionally, physically, mentally. So, we'll take a minute to review the continuum of mental health.

00:47 If you recall, the continuum of mental health ranges from mental well-being to severe mental illness, and a child can exist anywhere along that continuum. Mental health is affected by many, many factors. They are physical, they are emotional, and they are mental. All of these factors are going to impact the emotional, physical, mental development of a child. What do we most commonly see in children who have mental health disorders? And remember even if you're not working in psychiatric nursing, if you are working in pediatrics, if you are working in family clinics, you want to be able to be aware of these factors. Anxiety is one of the most common mental health challenges we're seeing in childhood along with depression. It may be both anxiety and depression that we are seeing. There is also oppositional defiant disorder. And an oppositional defiant disorder is usually diagnosed when the child is getting into social situation like school and refuses to adhere to rules and is defiant in the face of authority. Also conduct disorder.

02:29 Conduct disorder is where we're looking at a child who is seemingly lacking empathy.

02:36 And this child will hurt people, will go against what is the rules and regulations and not care.

02:45 This person oftentimes with conduct disorder is breaking rules and not only breaking rules but also breaking loss. And then we have attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactive disorder where we are seeing in youth that they are having an inability to concentrate, to focus, and to complete tasks. Each one of these diagnoses come with a full set of symptoms and signs that help to diagnose the child with the disorder. Obsessive compulsive disorder where the child has obsessive thoughts. Remember we, at some point, will talk about the idea of intrusive thoughts, those thoughts that the child can't get out of their mind like there are germs everywhere and then compulsive behavior that attempts to assuage that obsessive thought. So if we're thinking there are germs everywhere, the child might be washing his or her hands compulsively, unable to stop. Posttraumatic stress disorder occurs with children. When a child is experiencing some trauma, might be living in a household where there is argument, where there is the potential for divorce, and every single day this child is experiencing the anxiety that comes with the trauma of having a possible divorced parents and a broken home. Also, there are learning and developmental disorders. And these learning and developmental disorders may be coming from a neurological condition like epilepsy. So, epilepsy comes with a spectrum of 3 different disorders. We often see epilepsy with obsessive compulsive disorder with a tic syndrome and with anxiety. We also have Tourette syndrome and in Tourette syndrome what you're seeing with that child is there will be outbursts where the child may suddenly shout out a word. It may be appropriate, it may be inappropriate. They may have a tic along with the Tourette syndrome. There is also the autism spectrum disorder where our child is somewhere on the spectrum of autism which impacts their learning, it impacts their emotional behaviors, their connectivity with others. Depending on where they are on that spectrum.