I just don’t trust there’s a simple enough answer to this question beyond finding some way to make quality mental/emotional healthcare more affordable and available from a young age.
While I’m sure I won’t be able to interest you in an expansion of federal aid in paying for said services, I would personally propose closing the loopholes medical insurance companies use to outsource mental health care and at least be transparent in what will *actually* be covered under a private insurance plan. Many private plans provide “100% coverage” on such services but then hide that this care is covered instead by a different sub-network that is severely limited.
Autism and ADHD and all of the mental health disorders on the rise are in part due to the under-treatment as much as the over-treatment. Rather than have specialized providers evaluating and caring for children, we have PCPs using a questionnaire and prescribing pills to match the answers. So I simply don’t trust the data underpinning this epidemic to begin with. I’m sure a combination of providers actually trying to treat disorders and more societal awareness of symptoms is driving some organic increase to these diagnoses that isn’t sinister in nature, and that the rise of social media and screen time and the social isolation it can cause is a driving factor as well. But rather than accept we might not have a single cause for this, we’re going to pretend it’s vaccines.
