%A Malavika Kapur
%J Journal of Indian Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health
%T An Integrated Approach to the delivery of Child Mental Health Services
%X While these documents contain very welcome recommendations for the well being of
children, they touch upon the issues of child mental health only indirectly. Further, they
do not set up any priorities; nor do they offer any data, which would help to set up the
priorities.
One would have imagined that the mental health professionals would themselves have
taken up the issue of priorities. What one sees is that while the professionals have fought
valiant battles to safeguard the mental health of adult population, they have done very
little for the mental health of children. In this context it is of interest that intense lobbying
has been carried out for the care of children with developmental disabilities, so much so
that mental handicap has become synonymous with mental health of children in the minds
of the NGOs advocating the cause of the former, the authorities to whom representations
are made and the population at large. One has no quarrel with the concern for mental
handicap, but the effort seems to be unbalanced. One can only assume that if the mental
health professionals had themselves taken part in this lobbying process, mental health
issues could have been projected with as much enthusiasm as that of mental handicap.
One must remember that in the West, a strong lobby for the cause of the mentally
handicapped children arose as a part of an overall push for extensive and broad
based mental health and counselling services for the children.
%N 1
%K child mental health
%P 4
%E I Sharma
%E Rajesh Sagar
%E Mona Srivastava
%E Beena Johnson
%V 1
%D 2005
%I Indian Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health
%L cogprints4208

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