Mental Health of Children and Adolescents: An Area of Global Neglect (review)

The mental health of children and adolescents is an issue that affects anyone who works with or for children, and to think of these issues in terms of city, state, or country is outdated. In the current culture, children's mental health concerns are often swept under the carpet or redirected into accusations of poor parenting. The field needs to not only address the issue of mental health of children and adolescents but also to think about this subject in a boarder sense because these matters impose a large burden on society, as shown though the authors words: "Although priorities vary from country to country, the need to prevent child and adolescent psychiatric disorders is universal" (p. 129). Mental Health of Children and Adolescents: An area of global neglect is designed to showcase the Presidential Programme on Child and Mental Health as well as highlighting specific problems in the field. Mental Health of Children and Adolescents serves as an advocacy piece as well as capturing the public's attention with the intent to influence policy and increase sensitivity to the subject of child and adolescent mental health as a global issue.

The authors attempt to capture a vast audience in this collection of essays written by ministers of health, policymakers, educational leaders, and leaders of governments from across the global community. This report has five editors: Helmut Remschmidt, Barry Nurcombe, Myron Lowell Belfer, Norman Sartorius, and Ahmed Okasha. All have served the World Health Organization (WHO) and are internationally recognized. The authors offer policy advice and ground themselves in the belief that, "The primary determinates of disease are economic and social and therefore its remedies must also be economic and social. Medicine and politics cannot and should not be kept apart" (p. 18). The five editors call on forty contributors and in doing so create a disjointed piece. The lack of cohesion may be expected from the collection, but the editors' lack of explanation of an overarching theme intensifies the confusion. The only clarification of the book is a preface which provides a rough outline which could be deduced from the table of contents.

Mental Health of Children and Adolescents is roughly divided into three sections: part one introduces and describes the program, part two describes the findings of a feasibility study, and the third part reviews the knowledge of prevention of mental disorders in childhood as well as including three case studies. It appears that the essential point of this book is not just to review what has been done so far, but also to obtain a wide audience for the authors' platform of advocacy.

Section One is a collection of three essays that develops the idea of the global burden of child and adolescent mental disorders. This section is the most chaotic. It includes Chapter One and Chapter Three that both look at the Leibson 2001 study, Use and cost of medical care for children and adolescents with and without attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder, from which the editors arrive at different conclusions about the study and its implications.

In this section, Chapter One describes the goals of the program in which Mental Health of Children and Adolescents emphasizes the three tenets of raising awareness, promoting primary prevention, and offering support though evidence-based methods of treatment. This section also illuminates the policy support for the editors' position on the global importance of child and adolescent mental health. In 1989, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) was passed into international mandate, although the United States is one of the only countries that never completed their ratification processes. Various authors discuss the CRC as a foundation throughout the book, and reiterate the goal that in order to obtain "the full and harmonious development of his or her personality the child should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere...