Vermont mental health services for children doubles in last two decades
Department of Mental Health Commissioner Sarah Squirrell
In the past two decades, the number of young people 18 and under accessing mental health services has doubled. A recent report showed that one in three children in the state experience at least one “adverse childhood experience” before age nine.
The report from Building Bright Futures, a non-profit organization in Vermont that monitors early care, health, and education systems for potential legislative policy improvements, explained that adverse childhood experiences, or ACES, typically involve living in a home that struggles to cover basic needs.
It can be anything from divorce to living with someone who has a substance abuse disorder or mental health challenge. Incarceration of a parent, illness, domestic violence, or even a parent’s death can also be a root cause.
While all of those things can be difficult to manage for any child, Vermont is good at identifying children in need of support, says Department of Mental Health Commissioner Sarah Squirrell.
She noted that in 2017, 61 percent of children in the state received a developmental screening, which is one of the largest factors in ensuring children get the support they need.
This past February at a suicide prevention event at Vermont’s State House, Squirrell spoke about the effects of challenges on kids and their families, particularly when mental health issues result in suicide.
“At any given time, many of us experience challenges in our lives, see our children and loved ones, our families, our friends struggling,” she said. “The weight of these stresses can lead to thoughts of suicide.”
Gina Plasse, MS, a mental health clinician and supervisor at Howard Center in Burlington, a designated mental health provider in Chittenden County, agrees that Vermont does a good job at streamlining the process so families can get access to necessary services.
“There’s a strong level of cooperation. In just the past few years, there’s been a focus to make services as easy as possible,” she said. “In many cases, there is one main number to call if you need help. Your case is assessed and referred to the proper service. No need for families to go to multiple outlets. We’ve even integrated three separate local crisis teams into one.”
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, 50 percent of all lifetime mental illnesses develop by age 14 and 75 percent develop by age 24. But teens and young adults with mental health challenges are not getting the treatment they need.
A study published in JAMA Pediatrics last year showed one in seven children have a treatable mental health disorder with only half of them receiving professional care.
Beth Truzansky, Building Bright Future’s deputy director, said additional research shows adults with ACES in childhood have higher rates of chronic illness. A 2018 study published in Boston Medical Center Pediatrics noted the direct connection between ACES and delays in cognitive development and other physical ailments such as asthma, weight gain, recurrent infections, and even sleep disruption.
Those same issues can carry into adulthood and can have other consequences like substance abuse, diabetes, or stroke.
Plasse, who was part of the Early Childhood Mental Health Task Force and worked on the Building Bright Futures report, says it’s a trickle-down issue. If a parent has ACES, they pass it on to their kids. Then it’s just a vicious cycle of adversity in youth leading to chronic illness in adulthood.
“There is a relationship between the number of ACES and the risk of health outcomes,” said Plasse. “As ACES increase, so do the negative outcomes.”
September 14th, 2020 at 5:04 pm
Frank Sterle Jr. posted:
A passage from the book Childhood Disrupted (How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal) in part reads: “Well-meaning and loving parents can unintentionally do harm to a child if they are not well informed about human development …”
For example, would a large percentage of procreative adults specifically comprehend that, since it cannot ‘fight or flight’, a baby stuck in a crib on its back while hearing voluble adult discord in the next room can only mentally freeze; and if allowed to chronically continue for a sufficient duration of time, this consequential effect causes the brain to dysfunctionally develop? That it can be the helpless infant’s starting point towards a childhood, adolescence and (in particular) adulthood in which its brain uncontrollably releases potentially damaging levels of stress hormones, even in non-stressful daily routines?
Yet society generally treats human procreative rights as though we’ll somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and appropriately nurture our children’s naturally developing minds and needs.
I strongly believe that a psychologically sound as well as a physically healthy future should be all children’s foremost right—especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter—and therefore basic child development science and rearing should be learned long before the average person has their first child.
By not teaching this to high school students, is it not as though societally we’re implying that anyone can comfortably enough go forth with unconditionally bearing children with whatever minute amount, if any at all, of such vital knowledge they happen to have acquired over time?
Perhaps foremost to consider is that during their first three to six years of life (depending on which expert one asks) children have particularly malleable minds (like a dry sponge squeezed and released under water), thus they’re exceptionally vulnerable to whatever rearing environment in which they happened to have been placed by fate.
I frequently wonder: how many instances there are wherein immense long-term suffering by children of dysfunctional rearing might have been prevented had the parent(s) received some crucial parenting instruction by way of mandatory high school curriculum?