Get Serious About Mental Health Care

Editor’s note: Aaron E. Carroll is an associate professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine and the director of the university’s Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research. He blogs about health policy at The Incidental Economist and tweets at @aaronecarroll.

(CNN) — In the wake of last week’s tragedy in Newtown, I have been asked a million questions about gun control. I’ve seen pictures of the weapon the killer used. I’ve heard stories about the number of bullets in the clip and the number of guns in his mother’s home. I’ve even heard politicians argue that school officials should be armed with semiautomatic weapons.

I’ve also heard about mental health.

We should be careful not to blame the mentally ill for all crimes. But we should also be prepared to accept that we might be able to prevent some tragedies if we did a better job of caring for them.

I’ve seen mental health illness in children, and our system is ill-equipped to handle it. I’ve seen families struggle with it. One of my greatest frustrations with clinical practice is that there are far too many times when I lack the tools necessary to care for children who need help. It’s relatively easy to cure an infection or an acute physical ailment. It’s so much harder to take a mental health issue. There are rarely pills that will do the job. Even when they are, they almost never work perfectly to eradicate the problem.

Studies show that more than 10% of children in the United States might benefit from some sort of mental health treatment. Most don’t get it. We often don’t have the research to tell us how best to care for these problems. Even when we do, we often lack the capacity. There is a shortage of resources and services available to serve children. Furthermore, even when those resources exist, a lack of coordination often prevents they’re being used effectively.