Colorado’s Public Health Leadership Wants to Help with Your Kid’s Mental Health Concerns; They Claim Policy, Advocacy and a lot of Money are the Cure-All. Even as Public Health Leaders Nationwide, and in Colorado, Effectively Caused Pediatric Mental Illness with Clearly Counterproductive Lockdowns and School Closures.
Coloradans know that pediatric and adolescent mental health need attention in their state. Two figures show us how serious it is:
- 25% spike in ER pediatric mental health visits across Children’s Hospital Colorado network Jan. 1 to March 15, 2022, compared to the same dates last year
- 73% more mental health ER visits Jan. to May 2021 than the same time for Jan. 2019
And it’s not just Colorado, it’s the nation. Earlier this year, Joe Biden trumpeted the mental health needs of children across the US. “Second, let’s take on mental health, especially among our children, whose lives and education have been turned upside down.”
Very true. In that State of the Union address, he proffered his flagship utopian proposal to solve the mental health problem. Solving the problem means a lot of bureaucracy and money.
Leaders in Colorado’s pediatric public health were excited. K. Ron-Li Liaw, M.D. Mental Health-In-Chief at Children’s Hospital Colorado said, “President Biden’s plan could be just the help we need to turn the tide on this crisis.”
A top executive at the same hospital system, Heidi Baskfield, JD was garishly enthusiastic: “The Biden plan is historic and demanding of praise.” She is the Vice President of Population Health and Advocacy at Children’s Hospital Colorado. Her experience is heavy in government legal work, legislative legal work and a decade-plus in the “advocacy” sector.
Joe Biden added in his address that “[c]hildren were also struggling before the pandemic.” Yes, but we know why it’s worse now.
The Solution is Apparently More Policy, But What Was the Problem?
Digging through the links of Colorado health leadership’s documents, the idea of solving the crisis yesterday is paramount. And hard statistics (there are plenty of mushy statistics) on the scope of the crisis are stubbornly hard to find, even from the experts. The implied message is, apparently, “Just trust us.”
Coloradans of all stripes agree children’s mental health–politics or personal, micro or macro–is a bedrock issue. But those in leadership and governance are unsettlingly eager with solutions in the form of policy, task forces, trainings and so on.
A pound of new agencies and policies is apparently worth an ounce of opening school.
We see some conceptual priorities within The Children and Youth Mental Health Playbook Emergency Response put out by Children’s Colorado along with various nonprofits and advocacy groups. There are only four mentions of “pandemic” / “epidemic,” yet “funding” got mentioned 17 times along with four “infrastructure.”
Mentions in Children’s Colorado Youth Mental Health Crisis Playbook
- “pandemic” or “epidemic” – 4
- “COVID-19” – 2
- “family” or “families” – 4
- “schools” – 3
- “social” – 0
- “depression” – 1
- “funding” – 17
- “development” – 0
- “infrastructure” – 4
- “grants” – 5
- “investments”, “investment” or “invest” – 4
Extended Lockdowns Were a Major Policy Failure; Worthy of Some Aftermath Reckoning
School closures, after the initial shockwave of 2020, were largely unnecessary. Counterproductively, they also had the practical effect of hobbling children’s social and educational development. Social and educational development are key factors in pediatric and adolescent psychiatry and psychology. One might say they are more important than a policy or a task force.
Any serious deductive examination of the research (some was available in 2020) will find the protracted school closures were not needed and were a net harm to children, especially in their mental health.
“Lockdowns have absolutely catastrophic effects on physical and mental health of populations both domestically and internationally . . . For people who are under 60 or 50 the lockdown harms—again mentally and physically—are worse than COVID.”
– Jayanta Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D. (Sr. Fellow at Stanford Economic Policy Research | Stanford Professor of Medicine)
That’s a true expert’s opinion–one who isn’t running for re-election. Here’s some more context:
Key Facts in the School Closure and Lockdown Faults
- Adolescents (ages 10-19) were less than 1% (0.19%) of Colorado COVID deaths
- Infant and pediatric COVID deaths (ages 0-9) comprised less than one-tenth of a percent (0.09%)
- A child’s school-to-home transmission to elderly adults is a demographically minuscule risk. Though recent data are hard to come by, estimates range from 3.8% to 10% but only up to 11% during national financial crises for young US children living under the same roof as their grandparents.
Another interesting point: a study including data from National Geographic and Outside Online shows Colorado medals in competition for the most outdoors-active state, behind only Hawaii and California. If you went outside during the pandemic, you know these were ignored or modified guidelines in Colorado; a lot of people safely took to the great outdoors. Nonetheless, these are notably inverted expectations between policy and family. That disconnect between experts in children’s health and parents resembles national conversations right now.
Leftist public health leadership in Colorado and nationwide communicated and set up policy with shrill, moralistic alarmism. In most of the US, kids were forced inside and kept there. These isolations were based on flimsy or absent data regarding childhood risks for getting seriously sick or dying.
Parents Want Answers Before the Solutions
One solution already in place from Colorado medical leadership is the unsettling, Orwellian, yet-to-be-clearly-defined, “Behavioral Health Administration” for the state. Slow down.
The parents, guardians and caregivers in Colorado would probably like something else first: an answer to 2020, 2021 and the non-reality-based policies of public health.
Coloradans are reasonable but open-minded people who know homeopathic medicine can work, sometimes. But solving a largely government-created problem with more bureaucracy?
No homeopathic governance, thank you.
