Epidemic? Half of US teens ‘meet criteria for mental disorder’

Did you ever wonder how we got here????????????????????

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/10/teens-meet-criteria-mental-disorder/

WASHINGTON — Around half of US teens meet the criteria for a mental disorder and nearly one in four report having a mood, behavior or anxiety disorder that interferes with daily life, American researchers say.

Fifty-one percent of boys and 49 percent of girls aged 13-19 have a mood, behavior, anxiety or substance use disorder, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

In 22.2 percent of teens, the disorder was so severe it impaired their daily activities and caused great distress, says the study led by Kathleen Merikangas of the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH).

"The prevalence of severe emotional and behavior disorders is even higher than the most frequent major physical conditions in adolescence, including asthma or diabetes," the study says.

Mental problems do not get the same attention from public health authorities even though they cost US families around a quarter of a trillion dollars a year, according to the study.

When I was 13-19 I was shy, a little down, energetic, disorganized, anxious, horny, and superstitious all through that time at various points. I drank beer, used tobacco, and smoked pot every chance I got all through that time as well. I wasn't sick or addicted. I was just a kid going through puberty, experimenting, and trying to fit in.

Is puberty a disease now? Would the researches have read the previous paragraph as social anxiety, depression, manic, ADD, panic attacks, promiscuity, delusions, and addiction?

Later in the story they said that the researchers found that only 8 percent of the teenagers studied actually had problems that disrupted their daily lives. That's about how many adults have mental illnesses as well.

At least that is what is mentioned in the abstract of the actual paper.


Lifetime prevalence of mental disorders in U.S. adolescents: results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication--Adolescent Supplement (NCS-A).

Merikangas KR, He JP, Burstein M, Swanson SA, Avenevoli S, Cui L, Benjet C, Georgiades K, Swendsen J.

Genetic Epidemiology Research Branch, Intramural Research Program, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
Comment in:

* J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2010 Oct;49(10):975-6.

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To present estimates of the lifetime prevalence of DSM-IV mental disorders with and without severe impairment, their comorbidity across broad classes of disorder, and their sociodemographic correlates.

METHOD: The National Comorbidity Survey-Adolescent Supplement NCS-A is a nationally representative face-to-face survey of 10,123 adolescents aged 13 to 18 years in the continental United States. DSM-IV mental disorders were assessed using a modified version of the fully structured World Health Organization Composite International Diagnostic Interview.

RESULTS: Anxiety disorders were the most common condition (31.9%), followed by behavior disorders (19.1%), mood disorders (14.3%), and substance use disorders (11.4%), with approximately 40% of participants with one class of disorder also meeting criteria for another class of lifetime disorder. The overall prevalence of disorders with severe impairment and/or distress was 22.2% (11.2% with mood disorders, 8.3% with anxiety disorders, and 9.6% behavior disorders). The median age of onset for disorder classes was earliest for anxiety (6 years), followed by 11 years for behavior, 13 years for mood, and 15 years for substance use disorders.

The things that you mention in your first four sentences could be richly discussed from that point of view without considering them to be expression of mental illness.

Yet, many DSM disorders have developmental components and many (most?)of those disorders manifest themselves by the end of the teen years. So it's an obvious thing for an epidemiologist of mental illness to study. Questions like 'how many individuals are psychologically challenged and how many emerge unscathed,' and 'what life experiences correlate with healthy vs disordered outcomes' are of obviously of interest to people trying to explain and manage mental illness that have developmental components. Once we have some reliable baseline data, it's possible to start asking questions of anthropological interest about differences between morbidity under different cultures.

Puberty is a biological phenomenon that begins in the 'tweens' and is concurrent with only the early teenage years. Being a teenager is simply a matter of how our decimal based counting system is applied to years of life. By mid teenage years people are biologically functional adults and by late teenage years their development has drawn to near an end. As you probably know, there is much discussion about how this period of sub-adulthood gnashes together contemporary social structures and evolutionary rooted bio-social demands of human life-history.

Resolving the conflicts would be expected to require some cognitive gymnastics. It would be expected that some of us do better than others. You don't need me to write a short-answer essay on it. This study seems to indicate that half of the 10k teens surveyed for this study were struggling with the acquisition of those skills.

I can totally understand why teenagers would develop mental disorders. We are living in a messed up social system. They are told to study, as though that will lead to a better life, which is not always true. They are told that joining the military is honorable yet it is likely to have a negative impact on their lives. They are told we are living in a free country yet that's untrue. They are told good behavior is rewarded and that's sometimes true, but often not. They are given mixed signals every waking moment, so I'm surprised the percentage is not higher.