"4208","An Integrated Approach to the delivery of Child Mental Health Services","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.","http://cogprints.org/4208/","Kapur, Malavika","Sharma, I and Sagar, Rajesh and Srivastava, Mona and Johnson, Beena"," Kapur, Malavika (2005) An Integrated Approach to the delivery of Child Mental Health Services. [Journal (Paginated)] ","","2005-01"