What are the diagnoses most often seen in school-age children and are there age, race and/or gender differences?
GTP: In our school-based mental health clinics, we often see children who are referred for emotional or behavioral problems, but who turn out not to have a psychiatric disorder. These students are suffering from stresses in their lives, and their symptoms will resolve when the stress is relieved, or they adapt. Of those who actually have psychiatric disorders, ADHD is by far the most common, followed by depression and anxiety disorders. Race and ethnicity are not factors in the prevalence of psychiatric disorders in children, but age and gender are— all of the common psychiatric disorders of early childhood are much more prevalent in boys. In early adolescence, the sex ratio begins to reverse, and by late adolescence, many more girls than boys are afflicted. An interesting hypothesis about this dramatic shift in gender is that depressive illness, alcoholism, and criminal behavior are different expressions of the same underlying disability; therefore, if we consider both sexes with chem
