Epidemiology of Mental Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence (Nursing)

00:00 When we think about the facts underscoring the childhood youth mental illnesses, it's important to recall that there are 17.4% of children and youth who have a diagnosable disorder and that was prior to the COVID pandemic. ADHD behavior problems, anxiety, and depression were the most prevalent of the disorders that we were identifying at that time. So, with ADHD, 9.4% of children between the ages of 2 and 17, and that's approximately 6.1 million children, have the diagnosis of ADHD. One of the things that I want to discuss with ADHD is as nurses we have medications that can help a child with ADHD. Oftentimes parents will be quite reluctant to put a child on medication. But ADHD medications help that child to be able to focus, to be able to complete tasks and stay on tasks which actually reduces their anxiety and increases their ability to be social. Behavior problems, well we have 7.4% of children who are between the ages of 3 and 17 and that's almost 4.5 million children who have behavior problems. Within that 7.4% of children, only about half or 53.3% received any treatment for those behavior problems.

02:04 Anxiety, 7.1% of children between 3 and 17, again about 4.4 million children experience diagnosable anxiety disorder. And this disorder is increasing, it's been on the increase where in 2007 only 5.5% of the youth and children were being diagnosed with anxiety up to 6.4% in 2011 and 2012. We still have to learn what impact the pandemic has had on childhood anxiety. What we know though is that children between the ages of 3 and 17 who have anxiety, more than 1 in 3 of them also have a behavior problem. That's almost 38%. And 1 in 3 also have depression which is about 32%. When you think about the fact that these exist simultaneously, that children with anxiety may be acting out and also have depression, the idea of being able to diagnose them becomes more important. Because only 59% or 6 in 10 children actually receive treatment for it. When we know that there is something that can help somebody, it's really imperative that we keep our eyes and ears open, that we watch children and we are able to help refer them to where they would be able to get proper treatment. Depression is seen in 3.2% of the children who are between 3 and 17 or almost 2 million children, 1.9 million. When we think about the fact that 3 in 4 children who are between the ages of 3 and 17 who have depression also concurrently have anxiety and behavior problems. So 73.8% of the children who have depression also have anxiety. And almost 50%, 1 in 2, have behavior problems. Oftentimes it's the behavior problems that we are seeing first. Because these adults, these are children that are not behaving in the way we consider the ideal child to behave. If we're not understanding that those behavior problems are a symptom of something else, we can often exacerbate the problem of anxiety and depression. So being able to sit back and watch and talk and establish a connection with the child is really really important. In this group, fortunately, 78.1% or 8 in 10 actually received treatment.

05:26 So, when we think about common disorders by age groups, depression, anxiety, and the behavior disorders, we notice that in different age groups we're seeing higher and lower depending upon the specific diagnosis.