Children and youth in foster care and their caregivers often experience mental health challenges. Rural settings introduce barriers that prevent these youth from accessing such services. Nevertheless, rural area school personnel, and particularly special educators, are positioned to help improve access to mental health services for foster care…

"State Policy Opportunities: Advancing Comprehensive School Mental Health Systems to Support Students" aims to help state leaders understand their role, as well as the urgency, in addressing student mental health needs. The specific recommendations, and the numerous state examples and resources provided, identify policy opportunities for…

Using the best available evidence to inform decision making is important for the design or delivery of effective health-related services and broader public policy. Several studies identify barriers and facilitators to evidence-informed decision making in Canadian health settings. This paper describes how the Ontario Centre of Excellence for Child…

Given the increasing identification of children with emotional/behavioral disorders (EBD), it is imperative that innovative ways of addressing these concerns are explored. Fewer than half of students identified with mental illness receive treatment, leaving a significant proportion of students to cope with mental illness without support. One…

This paper examines the U.S. social insurance system, which we define broadly to include both programs supported by dedicated taxes and other federal programs that provide income support, assistance in meeting basic needs, or services to improve economic opportunity. The paper considers the social insurance system as a whole as well as its…

We analyze the effects of a school-based program that offers children an opportunity to win prizes if they walk or bike to school during prize periods. We use daily child-level data and individual fixed effects models to measure the effect of the prizes, with variation in the timing of prize periods across different schools allowing us to estimate…

Background: Children involved in the child welfare system (CWS) have a greater need for mental health treatment relative to children in the general population. However, the research on mental health treatment for children in the CWS is sparse with only one known previous review of mental health services with children in the CWS. Objective: This…

Background: An emerging literature suggests that ethnic and cultural factors influence service utilisation among people with intellectual disability (ID), but this has not previously been reviewed. Aims: To investigate possible ethnic variation in uptake of mental health services in children, adolescents and adults with ID in high-income…

There are a growing number of children who begin to develop mental concerns during the school-age years. As such, it is important that schools recognize and understand mental health issues and are actively engaged in supporting these students. This article provides a review of mental health in schools, highlighting the importance of school-health…

This study explores the unmet need for mental health services among children with parents on probation. A group of 77 probationers provided information on 170 children. Information about children's need for mental health services was based on the Child Behavior Checklist and information about children's receipt of mental health services was based…

Objective: To describe the state of the literature on stigma associated with children's mental disorders and highlight gaps in empirical work. Method: We reviewed child mental illness stigma articles in (English only) peer-reviewed journals available through Medline and PsychInfo. We augmented these with adult-oriented stigma articles that focus…

This paper critically considers the growing interest in the use of Cognitive Behaviour Therapies to support children and young people presenting with a wide range of social-emotional difficulties. This focus has emerged since the prevalence of such difficulties in children and young people has increased over the past four decades, and the…

Concerns about the mental health and well-being of children and young people have been articulated in health and education policy fields as a call for closer working between schools and providers of mental health support services. Drawing from a Scottish study, this article explores issues of access, when mental health initiatives are sited in…

This study takes an in-depth look at parental acceptability (i.e., the ability to meet parent needs) of an intervention that has shown strong empirical support for treating and preventing childhood conduct disorder. The authors obtained acceptability data from 30 parents of children ages 5 to 12 years presenting externalizing behavior problems…

Although sleep problems often comprise core features of psychiatric disorders, inadequate attention has been paid to the complex, reciprocal relationships involved in the early regulation of sleep, emotion, and behavior. In this paper, we review the pediatric literature examining sleep in children with primary psychiatric disorders as well as…