The National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies recently published a report recommending that the federal government should make preventing mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders and promoting mental health in young people a national priority.
There is a chapter of the report that addresses mental health screening as a means of prevention of
mental, emotional and behavioral disorders in youth. The top-line
recommendations are:
- Identification of risk must be tied to effective intervention.
- Primary care settings, schools and communities are important settings for screening.
- Validated screening tools should be used; sensitivity to culture is highlighted.
- Guidelines must be agreed to for referrals; screening must avoid labeling.
- Targeting high risk youth (foster care, juvenile justice, youth with depressed parents) is good public health practice.
- A
national research plan on prevention of mental, emotional, and
behavioral disorders in youth should be developed and funded to learn
how to implement evidence-based screening and prevention in real world
community settings.
Click here to read the TeenScreen National Center's press release about this report.
Read this report online by visiting: http://nationalacademies.org/morenews/20090213.html.
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