WASHINGTON (AFP) – nearly half of U.S. kids meet the criteria of a mental disorder and almost one in four report having a mood disorders, anxiety or behavior that interferes with daily life, the researchers say Americans.
Fifty percent of boys and 49% of girls aged 13-19 have a mood, behavior, anxiety or substance use disorder, according to the study published in the Journal of American Academy of Psychiatry, adolescent and child.
22.2% of boys, the mess was so seriously impaired their daily activities and caused great anguish, says the study conducted by Kathleen Merikangas of national institutes of Mental Health (NIMH).
“The prevalence of severe emotional and behavioral disorders is even higher than the main physical conditions more frequent in adolescence, including asthma or diabetes,” says the study.
Mental problems do not get the same attention by public health authorities even if they cost US families about a quarter of a trillion dollars a year, according to the study.
About nine percent of all U.S. children have asthma and less than a quarter of one percent of all persons under the age of 20 have diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Merikangas and a team of researchers analyzed data from the study supplement-teenager co-morbidity national, which surveyed more than 10,000 U.S. teens.
The study is the first to track the prevalence of a wide range of mental disorders in a nationally representative sample of United States teens.
They found that almost a third of boys meets the criteria for the most common mental illness among youth States, anxiety disorders, including panic and social phobia “attacks”.
This class of disorder also had the early age of onset median, which occur in children of six years.
Behavioral Disorders, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, were the next most common condition (19.1%), followed by mood disorders (14.3%) as depression.
Eleven percent of boys with a mood disorder, 10 percent with behavioural disorders and eight percent who had anxiety disorders, especially social phobics, met the criteria for severe degradation, i.e. their condition influenced their daily lives and made them great distress.
Teen mental disorder rates reflect those seen in adults, suggesting that most adults develop a mental disorder before adulthood, the researchers say, calling for prevention and intervention earlier, more research to determine what are the risk factors for mental disorders in youth.
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