A shortage of mental health beds and poor communication between agencies contributed to the death of a teenage girl on hospital grounds, an inquest has found. Ellame Ford-Dunn, 16, who had a history of self-harm, died in March 2022 after absconding from an acute children's ward where she had been put because of a dearth of appropriate mental health beds.
Every day, many thousands of parents across the U.S. face the difficult question of whether to place their child or teenager on a psychotropic medication. Receiving a diagnosis of a mental disorder can be scary and confusing, for the youth as well as their parents/caretakers. What is ADHD? Depression? Anxiety? OCD? Bipolar? What are the available treatments? Do we have to use medications to treat the symptoms?
Each year, 20,000 children and adolescents across the U.S. lose a parent to gun violence, while an estimated two to three times more have a parent who has been injured due to a firearm. Investigators from Harvard and Mass General Brigham analyzed records from a large health insurance database and found that in the year following a parent's injury, children had increases in psychiatric diagnoses and mental health visits, especially if the parent had suffered a severe injury.
The increase in reported mental health problems and neurodevelopmental diagnoses, and services not keeping pace, reflect what many clinicians see every day people are in more distress and unable to access support. The suffering is not fake, nor is it a case of gen Z malingering. Patients are struggling with what were once ordinary demands of life: school, work, relationships and family, complicated by the aftermath of Covid, with blurred boundaries between home and work, and life lived increasingly on screens.