Important Report Released In Recognition of Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, but did you know that Thursday, May 4th is Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day?

Children’s Mental Health Facts:

  • 1 in 5 children ages 13 to 18 have, or will have a serious mental illness
  • 50% of all lifetime mental illness begins by the age of 14 and 75% by the age of 24.
  • The average delay between onset of symptoms and intervention is 8 to 10 years.

Additional facts are available here:

In recognition of Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day, Young Minds Advocacy released their report “California’s Children and Youths’ System of Care: An Agenda to Transform Promises into Practice.”  The report includes:

  1. Importance of children’s mental health
  2. Reasons for a distinct children and youth focused mental health policy
  3. Overview of California’s publically funded mental health system(s) for children and youth
  4. Recommendations for stakeholders

Recommendations in the report include:

  1. Fulfilling existing promises to provide appropriate care to covered youth;
  2. Simplifying the system so that families and youth have one individualized plan that guides a team of cross-system helpers and resources using the wraparound model;
  3. Closing the quality and performance gap by systematically gathering, disseminating, and using timely, accurate, relevant, and actionable data at every level of the system;
  4. Greater accountability through sustainable community engagement and coalition-building;
  5. Transparent, responsive state and county leadership with clearly articulated responsibilities and goals; and
  6. Setting a timeline for providing all of California’s children and youth full and equal access to mental health care

The full report can be found here.

The Author of the report, Patrick Gardner, will be presenting the report and discussing the findings in a workshop during the CMHACY conference. Entitled: Setting the Agenda: Recommendations for California’s Children Mental Health Policy Agenda in 2017 and Beyond, the workshop will be held on Thursday from 1:30 to 3:00 in Scripps.  

What are you or your organization doing to raise awareness about children’s mental health? Let us know by sending an email to advocacy@cmhacy.org

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