Mental Health of Adolescents and Youth

The health and mental well-being of children and adolescents in general is good. Most are satisfied with their lives, perceive their health to be good, and do not regularly suffer from health complaints. The main problems of the first half of the 20th century, such as acute infections and high infant mortality, have diminished in importance. Instead of physical disorders, mental illness accounts for a large and growing share of ill health among children and adolescents in Europe. Including emotional problems, this may conduct problems and learning disabilities came to the fore in the middle of the last century. Currently, the frame of mental health and socio-economic influences on health has risen to achieve importance within child and adolescent health. World Health Organization (WHO) declared that young people’s mental health is a key area of concern to which professionals and policy-makers must direct their attention. Focusing only on mental health disorders does not give the whole picture of the state of mental health among young people. A general problem is the predominant understanding of mental health as the absence of mental disorder. Risk factor research has focused on mental health problems rather than strengths and positive outcomes. Consideration of resilience has emerged from research indicating that a proportion of young people had a positive life trajectory despite having faced diverse potentially harmful life experiences. Worldwide up to 20% of children and adolescents suffer from disabling mental health problems: Mental health of adolescents and youth, it is a very problematic issue that is not expressed only with elements. This required a lot of analysis and statistic to arrive for a result which serves to us for knowing and preventive the problem. As an issue, we must identify two major part of this: What is mental health (definition, cause, diffusion, ages, and preventive)? And what can we do to improve the mental health of Adolescents and Youth (family, society, hospitals, school, and public places)? The estimates of psychological problems and disorders may therefore be higher than is reported in studies. On an individual level, mental health problems can have deteriorating effects on young people’s social, intellectual, and emotional development and consequently on their future. At its worst, they can lead to loss of life. Suicide is one of the three leading causes of death in young people and a public health concern in many European countries. Besides the negative effects on an individual level, mental illness affects also many other spheres of life―family, friends, and society at large―causing costs not only in health care system. Furthermore, there are close links between child and adult mental illness―the presence of mental illness during childhood may lead to up to 10 times higher costs during adulthood. Children are our future. Through well-conceived policy and planning, government can promote the mental health of children, for the benefit of the child, the family, the community, and society.