Often as we work with youth in the juvenile justice system, we find out too late that they are dealing with undiagnosed mental health challenges. Child Trends recently released three briefs in the Adolescent Health Highlights series. These briefs, which focus on issues related to adolescent mental health, highlight that:

• Resiliency has a strong link to positive mental health. More and more research is focusing on how important resiliency is and its connection to favorable life outcomes. This brief, Positive Mental Health: Resilience, offers helpful resources along with program strategies that foster ways adolescents can help themselves.
• The stigma attached to mental disorders, combined with other factors, lead to a drastic number of youth who do not receive the care they need. “Estimates suggest that between 60 to 90 percent of adolescents with mental health disorders fail to receive treatment (Knopf et. al., 2008).”  Access to Mental Health Care talks about barriers to treating youth with mental health disorders, as well as funding and insurance struggles associated with receiving care.
• A significant portion of youth experience varied mental health problems. Mental Health Disorders provides a good overview of basic mental health diagnoses common in adolescents as well as outlining some of the warning signs, trends in diagnoses, what types of consequences occur as they deal with the issues, promising treatment options, and barriers to receiving treatment.

As we continue to work toward effective assessment and intervention with youthful offenders, these briefs provide good background information that we need to keep in mind.

By Katey Collins and Jim Moeser