Child mental health

SIR – Stephen Fry and others (Letters, September 30) lament the rise in young people with mental health problems and urge the Government to use the Spending Review to pump more money into “early support hubs” to prevent small issues escalating into more serious conditions.

There is a major obstacle to this worthy aim: we currently have no agreed pathway for assessing mental health states. At an early stage, all that is observed is behaviour that can be seen as a concern. Yet “behaviour” in a child or young person can have myriad causes – psychiatric, psychological, biological and physiological.

Consequently, children with simple problems can be pathologised by Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services (Cahms) because of a lack of curiosity about the cause of the observed behaviour. My introduction to this came years ago through a young man with an extensive psychiatric and criminal history. It turned out that his life began to unravel when he failed to learn to read at school. Only later while in prison did he learn that this was due to Irlen syndrome, which meant he could not read black on white.

Since then I have come across a number of children and adults who were assumed to have a mental illness where in fact none existed. What they had was an inability to make sense of their world because their senses were not functioning correctly.

Not all symptoms of mental illness mean the presence of a mental illness. The challenge is in getting the initial assessment correct.

Richard Shircore

Langley, Berkshire