How Teleconferencing Could Help Urban Schools Solve a Mental Health Crisis

Let’s talk numbers here, because they’re striking. According to a 2000 report from the Department of Health and Human Services, 10 percent of American children and adolescents suffer from mental illness severe enough to cause impairment—but only one in five receives mental health services. As David Offord, a child psychiatrist with McMaster University, indicated in a presentation before the agency, emotional and behavioral problems dramatically reduce a child’s quality of life. “No other set of conditions is close in the magnitude of its deleterious effects on children and youth in this age group,” he told a conference of government and private health experts. “The cost to society is high in both human and fiscal terms.”

Here’s at least part of the problem: Though experts say school is the best place to get children much-needed mental health services, there aren’t enough school-based mental health professionals to go around. Researchers estimate there are about 8,300 school psychiatrists in the entire U.S., or about one available specialist to every 370 affected children. School psychologists are more common; by contrast, a 2005 study found about 38,000 practicing in the country. But psychologists do not attend medical school (though about a third have doctoral degrees), and they can’t, crucially, prescribe psychotropic medications.