This week, as you know from the front page of the Courier, is Children's Mental Health Awareness Week. On Monday night, Winchendon residents joined local legislators and town officials outside of Town Hall to hear the reading of a proclamation, signed by the Board of Selectmen, acknowledging the need for Children's Mental Health Awareness Week. The Town Hall porch was then lighted with green lights. Several surrounding communities also held ceremonies and lit their town or city halls up in green, including Ashburnham and Gardner.

Mental health care, for all ages, is disgracefully deficient in the United States. Our pathological delusion that everyone should be "independent" and "self-sufficient" feeds the self-justifying rationalization that society shouldn't be "giving out handouts" by helping the vulnerable. It also prevents people from asking for help. To admit to a mental health issue is seen as shameful and weak. It's also taboo. Persons struggling with problems fear losing their jobs and being stigmatized if they seek mental health care or admit to a mental health issue, and all too often, this is exactly what happens.

Families trying to help a child with mental health problems often experience enormous difficulty in finding services and care, especially as the child grows older and may behave in ways that put themself or others at risk. Benefits run out; medical insurance covers mental health care haphazardly and inadequately, and caps the benefits without regard to need; residential care is often unavailable.

No one would ever want to return to the "snake pit" mental institutions of the past. But families now are often left with almost no options. I have heard countless stories about parents taking a child to the emergency room with a mental health crisis and seeing the child relegated to a gurney in the hall for 24, or 48, or 72 hours because no bed is available in a pediatric mental health unit.

Because severely mentally ill adults can't get care, they often end up homeless. Estimates vary, but 20 to 30 percent of chronically homeless adults have severe mental health issues--as opposed to about 5 percent of the population overall. 10 to 25 percent of persons in prison have severe mental health conditions, and about 50 percent of incarcerated persons have some mental health issues. Our prisons have become the "snake pits" most Americans imagined were closed down--without even the degree of care, such as it was, that the old mental hospitals offered.

All too often, children with serious mental health conditions whose families can't find them care end up on the fast track to homelessness or prison. Most of them won't ever harm anyone else; there are tragic exceptions. In every case, we hear that the family spent years trying to get help for their child, only to meet roadblocks at every turn.

But children are at serious risk long before they reach that point. The second leading cause of death for young persons aged 10 to 24 is suicide. Suicide rates for this age group have been rising. (A large percentage of these deaths could be prevented with protocols that kept guns out of kids' hands.) Children as young as 5 have died by suicide.

Mental health is nothing less than a crisis in the United States. It's time for us to start behaving with compassion toward those who need help. Civilization wasn't created by "individualists" who cared about nothing except "their rights." It was created by people who put the interests of the whole group ahead of their own and understood that we only survive when we all work together. Improving mental health care will be good for all of us. But that's not the reason to do it. We must prioritize and improve mental health care because it's the only compassionate, decent, and moral thing to do.

Inanna Arthen