Little Otter reposted this
The Surgeon General's new warning on parents' mental health shouldn't be a surprise. Little Otter also has some incredible research on this topic, written by Health Evolution Fellow Helen Egger MD and Alison Stoner, PhD in their white paper "Breaking the Silence: Meeting the mental health needs of young children and their families." The most enlightening part to me was that "Children with a caregiver with poor mental health are twice as likely to have a mental health disorder and four times as likely to have poor general health compared to children with caregivers with good mental health(23). Mothers with mental health concerns use less effective parenting strategies and are less likely to develop strong, secure, healthy relationships with their children, which can negatively impact child social, emotional, and educational outcomes(2)." Helen Egger MD also shared with me some of their data on how helping part of the family with mental health improves mental health for family members who aren't even directly getting treatment. Wow. It's so deeply intuitive after you hear it, but our current system hasn't been set up to support whole families. I'm so glad to have met Helen Egger MD and Rebecca Egger through Health Evolution and to have them in our community. Their innovations including the whole-family approach care model are just what we need in health care. https://lnkd.in/gAgFR3ZN