The debate on child and adolescent psychiatric research is going global

Excerpt

Mental disorders are now one of the most common causes of global morbidity and they accounted for 7.4% of all disability adjusted life years in 2010 [1]. Up to 20% of children and adolescents across the world suffer from a disabling mental illness in any given year and almost a third will experience a mental disorder at some point during their life [2]. More than half of the mental health disorders in adulthood will have started by the age of 14 years [3] and this early disease onset, together with the chronic course of a poor mental health and the likelihood that the scale of the problem is underestimated, highlights the enormous global burden of child and adolescent mental health (CAMH) problems. This increasing burden has heightened our awareness of the need for responsive services, early identification and effective prevention [4]. However, attempts to improve child and adolescent psychiatry (CAP) have been hampered by limited numbers of medical professionals in countries with existing CAP services and the lack of existing CAP frameworks in other countries. …