How to identify, treat mental illness earlier in children

If we can help prevent psychosis in kids at risk, why wouldn't we?

Providing children with therapy that helps them manage symptoms and develop coping mechanisms for the challenges they face in life, and reinforce relationships - seems like an excellent service to provide teens whether or not they're diagnosed with schizophrenia later in life.

But what if the therapy turns from low-tech therapies into drugs? What if we misdiagnose teens, and unnecessarily prescribe anti-psychotics?

From NPR:

When you talk to people who have been through these programs and ask them what helped them, it is not the drugs, not the diagnosis. It's the lasting, one-on-one relationships with adults who listen...

Tiffany Martinez, an early client of Bill McFarlane's in Maine, chokes up when asked to describe what she thinks helped her climb out of an incipient mental health crisis that began when she was in college.

"To share such personal intimate details, you know? To have these people working so hard on it and so devoted and invested in the work," Martinez, now age 26, says, "it's like getting a chance. Just the program, what the program stands for alone, is hope."

Did you receive help for a mental illness as a child? Were your children treated for mental illness? Did it make a difference? Leave your comments and stories below.