[TW: suicide]

Frequently, pediatric doctors decide whether a child needs mental health treatment based on their school performance. If a child has straight As or As and Bs, and doesn’t do anything teachers find annoying or disobedient, pediatricians will say there is no need for treatment. This is poor reasoning, based on incomplete information. A child’s wellbeing and quality of life are not determined by their behavior and grades.

As a child, I would constantly lose my homework, forget to do it, lose track of time on tests, and fail to finish assignments. I spent my entire K-12 life being told I was lazy, I wasn’t working hard enough, I was irresponsible and should just do better. This kind of talk from family and teachers made me extremely anxious and self-deprecating. I cried constantly, never felt good enough. My mother took me to the doctor year after year to test me, insisting this had to be more than just a lack of discipline, but the doctors insisted I had no mental disability because my grades were perfectly fine. If I had no disability, then surely my shortcomings were all my fault, but no matter how hard I tried to be better, I couldn’t seem to fix the “mistakes” I was making. If I had no disability but still could not work hard enough, in eighth grade, I came to believe that I was broken. Simply a failure.

Children are people too. They listen and take criticism to heart. They feel good when they succeed and bad when they fail, and want the adults in their life to be proud of them. When they are told they are lazy or bad or any number of mean things, their mental health and quality of life suffer. 8th grade through high school, I believed I was broken, simply incapable of living up to expectations, and it resulted in anxiety, depression, and a generally horrible high school experience filled with excessive stress. My grades were fine, but my quality of life was poor. It wasn’t until I was 18 that a doctor (not a pediatrician) took my claims seriously and diagnosed me with ADHD, finally explaining and validating all the issues I struggled with my entire childhood. But the damage could not be undone. Still to this day, I struggle with anxiety, depression, and feelings of worthlessness brought on by years of being told that the only thing wrong with me was me.

But my case was only a mild one. So many children in America today suffer from mental health decline that the childhood suicide rate has spiked dramatically. Suicide is now the 8th leading cause of death in children and the 2nd leading cause in teenagers. Not just teenagers, but children- young children below the age of 12- are committing Suicide at a sickening rate. To refuse to take a child’s mental health seriously is to put their very lives at risk.

When a child’s grades and behavior are good, signs of disability are ignored. As of now, despite the rising suicide rates, pediatric doctors still base the mental needs of their patients on their grades. But a child is not their grades. They are complex little humans trying to make their way in life. Just because they are young does not mean they cannot suffer from poor mental health.

By signing this petition, you show that you agree that childhood mental health and mental disabilities should be taken more seriously and should no longer be judged based on their classroom performance. Pediatric doctors need to take their profession and the needs of the children they serve more seriously. To base their needs on things unrelated to the child’s own experiences is negligent. Let pediatricians know that children are more than their grades.