AN increasing amount of Bunbury and South West children are facing emotional or mental health problems but many are not getting the help they need.
This was the observation of Bunbury child development clinical director Dr Natalie Challis after the release of a statewide report last week.
The annual Health and Wellbeing of Children in WA 2013 report provides the health system and the public with information about all aspects of children aged zero to 15 years.
Dr Challis said the report showed 34 per cent of parents felt their child needed specialist help yet only 8.3 per cent were actually accessing treatment.
“This leaves a lot of parents and children struggling to cope with emotional or mental health problems on their own,” she said.
“This is particularly relevant for children aged five to nine years where treatment access appears to be much lower than for the 10 to 15 years age group.”
Dr Challis said she was seeing the trend reflected at the Bunbury Kids Development Centre, where she works with a functional neurologist, functional nutritionist, education specialist and psychologist.
She noted that local teachers were also reporting an increasing number of children in their classrooms needing the sort of specialist care they were not trained to provide, which puts a lot of stress on their role.
But for many children, nutrition and “the health of the gut environment” could play a critical factor in their mental wellbeing, she said.
“When you see in the report that 32 per cent of children are getting less than the daily recommended serves of fruit and up to 76 per cent of children less than the recommended daily serves of vegetables you begin to get an idea of the magnitude of the trend away from whole foods toward processed food,” Dr Challis said.
“What people don’t realise is that this impacts our mental health as well as our physical health.”
To read the full report, go to health.wa.gov.au
