Brain Matters
Blog

Each year about 15 million people in America experience the debilitating effects of depression. About one patient in seven doesn’t respond to treatment. Fritz Henn, M.D. Ph.D., is working hard to solve this problem. He’s a professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a member of the Foundation’s Scientific Council.​

There are three things that we usually look at to tell the difference between abnormal anxiety that is part of an anxiety disorder, and the anxiety that children, or really anybody, experiences as a normal part of life. The first and probably the most important thing we look at is whether there is impairment—anxiety that interferes with a person’s ability to function and leads to avoidance.

By all accounts, drug addiction across America has reached epidemic proportions. More than 22 million people suffer from substance abuse problems, and in 2014, over 43,000 died from unintentional drug overdoses in the United States. Despite these tragic numbers, there are few effective treatments for recovery, and relapse rates are high.

Suicidal ideation doesn’t carry an awful lot of weight at a very young age. And suicidal behavior––as distinguished from talking about it––is very, very rare in young children. You rarely see suicide attempts before puberty. The nature of most attempts in the young child are basically doing things that one’s parents say are dangerous.

You want to ask who at the school or hospital, or within its department of psychiatry, sees children. Find out who in particular specializes in the kind of problem your child may be facing. Once you are presented with the name of a doctor or therapist, it’s smart to ask how much experience that person has had with other children like yours, and what approaches to treatment he or she might take.