The pandemic has worsened the mental health of millions of children worldwide, but this is “just the tip of the iceberg” of the problems faced by many young people around the world.
This is the stark finding of the latest annual ‘State of the World’s Children’ report by Unicef which, for the first time, focuses on mental health.
Worldwide, it is estimated that more than one in seven adolescents aged 10 to 19 – some 86 million in total – live with a diagnosed mental disorder, while just over 45,000 adolescents die from suicide every year.
“Even [in the absence of] a pandemic, psychosocial distress and poor mental health afflict far too many children,” Henrietta Fore, executive director of Unicef, wrote in the report’s foreword.
“In fact, the Covid-19 pandemic represents merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to poor mental health outcomes,” she said. “It is an iceberg we have been ignoring for far too long, and unless we act, it will continue to have disastrous results for children and societies long after the pandemic is over.”
Yet – despite the scale of the issue – few countries have set aside funding to tackle deteriorating mental health, with just two per cent of government health budgets spent on mental health on average.
This is much lower in the world’s poorest countries, where less than $1 per person per year is spent treating mental health conditions, and there is a chronic shortage of child and and adolescent mental health professionals.
But the report, published on Tuesday, warns that the economic and social toll of this unaddressed mental health crisis is substantial. An analysis by the London School of Economics, for instance, estimates that mental ill health costs the global economy almost $390 billion a year.
The report calls for more investment in promoting and protecting mental health – rather than treating children already struggling – across a range of sectors, including teachers and social workers. Parents also need more support, it says, and more needs to be done to tackle lingering stigma.
“Mental health is a part of physical health – we cannot afford to continue to view it as otherwise,” said Ms Fore. “For far too long, in rich and poor countries alike, we have seen too little understanding and too little investment in a critical element of maximising every child’s potential. This needs to change.”
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