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If you could test your child to find out if a mental illness is likely in their future, would you do it? And if it came back positive how would you be proactive?

"The research was conducted in youth with a median age of 16 and was funded primarily by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health."

Of course it makes sense to me that intervening in the early stages of a mental illness could definitely help to alleviate some of the severity of the outcome. But I would think testing a child for something like this could also aide in their paranoia or self-hating. The illness doctors are most interested in heading off as early as possible is schizophrenia.

The combinations of factors that predicted psychosis included:

• deteriorating social functioning (for example, spending increasing amounts of time alone in one's room, doing nothing);
• a family history of psychosis combined with recent decline in ability to function (such as a drop in grades not explained by other factors or an unexplained withdrawal from extracurricular school activities).
• increase in unusual thoughts (such as thinking that strangers' conversations are about oneself);
• increase in suspicion/paranoia (such as suspicion of being followed); and
past or current drug abuse.

Most of this seems self-explanatory to me. I feel these are warning signs of definite issues that should be looked into regardless of this research study. Do you know what I mean? If my child had any of these risk factors I would absolutely try to help them. I don't see why a study had to be done on a bunch of teenagers to prove warning signs exist.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting the article. Let me know what you think.


SOURCE

Labels: mental health