Mentally Ill Kids Face Widespread Stigma

Most Americans also believe children are overmedicated, survey finds.

By Randy Dotinga
HealthDay Reporter
Monday, April 30, 2007; 12:00 AM

Copyright © 2007 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

MONDAY, April 30 (HealthDay News) -- Children with mental illness may face a double burden -- the condition itself, and discrimination and stigma at school and elsewhere, a new survey shows.

Almost half of U.S. adults polled expected that children undergoing mental health treatment would be rejected at school, and half anticipate that these youngsters will also suffer problems later in life.

At the same time, almost nine out of 10 Americans believe that doctors overmedicate kids with behavior problems.

"It's pretty clear that there's a lot of prejudice and discrimination about children's mental health problems in American culture," said lead researcher Bernice Pescosolido, professor of sociology at Indiana University. "These attitudes and beliefs are very powerful in terms of what happens to kids and their families."

Pescosolido said she and colleagues began examining attitudes about mental illness after reading news reports that stigma had begun to disappear. These came alongside what she called an "extraordinary tidal wave of [media] response" that was largely critical of changes in the treatment of mentally ill children.

Drugs are being prescribed more often to kids, and psychiatrists are diagnosing illnesses at much younger ages, Pescosolido said. Indeed, there are reports of kids being diagnosed when they are little more than babies.

For this study, her team examined the results of a 2002 survey of almost 1,400 adults; the margin of error was plus or minus four percentage points. The findings are published in the May 2007 issue of the journal Psychiatric Services.

Forty-five percent of those surveyed believed that kids who were undergoing mental health treatment would be rejected by their classmates at school, and 43 percent said that stigma around mental health issues would create problems for them in adulthood.

"No matter what that person attains later in life, this will follow them around," Pescosolido said. "This is classic stigma, when someone is marked and seen as less than (others)."