EBD Blog

Over on Teachers At Risk (great title!), Elona Hartjes has a post about her reaction to a popular press discussion about the prevalence of mental illness among school children.

Twenty percent of kids sitting in classrooms today are mentally ill. That’s shocking. What’s even more shocking is that only 1/5 of that twenty percent are getting treatment.

I could hardly believe my ears tonight when I heard that statistic on TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin. Next week, May 3 - May 10, 2008 , is Children’s Mental Health Week and I suppose that’s why the program, “Kids aren’t right” aired tonight.

Along with Steve Forness, Jim Kauffman and I began work on a thorough review of the prevalence of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders (EBD) among children and youths. We’ve seen quite a few divergent estimates. Of course, we’re pretty sure that the ~1% of US students who are receiving services for “Emotional Disorders” (the local parlance) is a low estimate. And some of the higher numbers bandied about are over-estimates, probably predicated on a rather loose interpretation of what constitutes EBD.

What is the “true” percentage? We’ll probably never know, as knowing would require consensus about definition and methods of counting, as well as a stop in the progress of time.