SA Child Gauge 2021

Child and adolescent mental health and wellbeing

Yet, access to Child and Adolescent Mental Health services in South Africa is extremely limited and concentrated in urban centres and private health care services, with most families, children and adolescents unable to access care. Untreated mental disorders impact on functioning, relationships, risk behaviour, health, education, productivity and care of the next generation. This has enormous social and economic costs across the life course and the next generation of children. It is therefore vital to intervene early in childhood to promote the wellbeing and optimal development of children and adolescents, to reduce the occurrence of and promote recovery from mental illness, The medicalization of distress has resulted in significant advances in the field of the pharmacological treatment of mental illness. However, it has resulted in a tendency to locate ‘the problem’/illness in the individual and in the ‘brain’ with until recently, little attention being paid to the impact of the psychosocial and socio-economic context on mental wellbeing and recovery from mental illness. Poverty, violence, exclusion and discrimination continue to be key drivers of poor mental health undermining the capacity of families to provide, protect and care for children. This burden gets heavier across the life course with impacts on children’s education and employment prospects. Similarly, constant exposure to violence of all types – including gender-based violence has the potential to erode children’s mental health and wellbeing, increasing the risk of further victimisation and/or perpetration of violence and the use of harsh parenting and corporal punishment.

The 2021 edition of the South African Child Gauge developed by the Children’s Institute (CI), supported by the CoE-HUMAN, collates and interrogates the latest evidence on child and adolescent mental health in South Africa. It reflects on current and emerging challenges, and identifies critical points of intervention in order to promote mental health, wellbeing and resilience across the life course.