Mental Health Awareness Week: In California, Mental Health Hospitalizations for Children and Youth on the Rise
As National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Week gets under way, we’re highlighting child mental health data available at kidsdata.org:
* Mental health hospitalization rates are rising for teenagers ages 15-19 in California: their mental health hospitalization rate rose 34% between 2007 and 2012.
* In 2012, children and teens faced mental health concerns serious enough to warrant nearly 38,000 hospitalizations.
Nationwide, mental health disorders among children and youth are on the rise, with an estimated one in five American children experiencing problems ranging from mild to life-threatening, according to a 2013 CDC study.
Experts who have studied mental health hospitalizations of children and youth say that while rates of these hospitalizations are higher, in-patient stays are shorter than in previous years possibly due to changes in health insurance authorizations for hospitalization and a decrease in available psychiatric beds.
For a deeper dive into our child mental health data, see these indicators:
Hospitalizations for Mental Health Issues, by Age Group
Depression-Related Feelings, by Grade Level
by Level of Connectedness to School
Number of Youth Suicides, by Age
Self-Inflicted Injury Hospitalizations
Other Resources
National Center for Children in Poverty: Children’s Mental Health
National Institute of Mental Health: Child and Adolescent Mental Health
Social and Emotional Development in Children and Adolescents Knowledge Path
Posted by Barbara Feder Ostrov
This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2014 at 3:31 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.