Since June 2000, The NESS Counseling Center has been affiliated with LAUSD/Healthy Start by providing mental health counseling services to L.A. Unified School District students identified through Healthy Start. This collaborative helps children in need of counseling who otherwise would not be able to receive this help.

The Ness Counseling Center sends social work interns to the schools directly to meet with the children on their school campus in order to eliminate any transportation issues. Often times, the social worker will determine that the parents and/or entire family system also needs mental health services and is able to extend this service as well. In addition, the social worker will work with the parents to access the appropriate resources the child might need.

Since it's inception, this collaborative has reached many at-risk children and their families, providing services at the appropriate level of intervention.

The burden of suffering experienced by children with mental health needs and their families has created a health crisis in this country. Growing numbers of children are suffering needlessly because their emotional, behavioral, and developmental needs are not being met by those very institutions which were explicitly created to take care of them. It is time that we as a Nation took seriously the task of preventing mental health problems and treating mental illnesses in youth.

Mental health refers to an individual’s ability to negotiate the daily challenges and social interactions of life without experiencing undue emotional or behavioral incapacity. Mental health and mental disorders can be affected by numerous factors including biologic, genetic, physical, and environmental conditions.

1. Children and youth experiencing mental health problems can be withdrawn, anxious or depressed, show aggressive or delinquent behaviors or have attention or thought disorders. Children with unrecognized or untreated cognitive and emotional disorders cannot learn adequately at school or benefit readily from the healthy peer and family relationships that are essential to becoming a healthy and productive adult. They are at heightened risk for school failure and dropping out, alcohol and drug use, unsafe behaviors for HIV transmission, criminal involvement, and many other problems.

2. Major depression, if untreated, is a strong risk factor for attempted suicide in youth and adults.

3. Nationally, an estimated two-thirds of all young people are not getting the mental health treatment they need.

4. Many children and youth do not have their mental health needs identified until they enter the juvenile probation or child welfare systems. Aggressive, acting out and delinquent behaviors are frequently the result of mental disturbance for children entering local juvenile probation programs. Nationally, it has been estimated that between 43 to 70% of abused and neglected children entering child welfare systems have mental health problems severe enough to warrant treatment.

5. In addition, an estimated 60% of teenagers in juvenile detention have behavioral, mental, or emotional disorders

Mental health is a critical component of children's learning and general health. Fostering social and emotional health in children as a part of healthy child development must therefore be a national priority. Both the promotion of mental health in children and the treatment of mental disorders should be major public health goals. Those concerned with children's mental health takes as its guiding principles a commitment to:

• Promoting the recognition of mental health as an essential part of child health;

• Integrating family, child and youth-centered mental health services into all systems that serve children and youth;

• Engaging families and incorporating the perspectives of children and youth in the development of all mental healthcare planning;

• Developing and enhancing a public-private health infrastructure to support these efforts to the fullest extent possible.