Mental Health and Children

More than 13 million American children and teenagers suffer from anxiety, depression, eating disorders, hyperactivity and other mental illnesses. The naturally irrational, impulsive or volatile behavior kids exhibit every day makes it tough to accurately diagnose them and medicating minors is a controversial practice, particularly when the study of child mental health is considered under-researched.

Host Frank Stasio discusses the challenge of diagnosing psychiatric disorders in children and the options for treating mentally ill youth with William Copeland, an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at Duke University; Dr. Helen Egger, a professor Head of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Duke’s Center for Developmental Epidemiology; Dr. James Jenson, a behavioral therapist and professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Medicine; Dr. Stephen Dickstein, a pediatric psychopharmacologist with the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit organization based in New York; and Susan Davis whose 9-year-old son was recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder.