In reflecting on the article Screening for anxiety disorders in children the authors, Ellin Simon and Susan Bogels, made many excellent discoveries and brought to light many new ideas that will help diagnose and treat children who suffer from mental disorders. The premise of their research was to examine the effectiveness of screening methods for mental disorders in school age children, differentiate between different disorders, and predict disorders that may arise in children. The mental disorders, as described in the article, that have the greatest impact on children are separation anxiety, social phobia, and panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, specific phobia, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Throughout the article the authors referenced two types of screenings, the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders and the Anxiety Disorder Interview Schedule, that are used to detect these mental disorders. The effects that anxiety disorders can have on an individuals quality of life can be detrimental if they are not diagnosed early and treated properly. The earlier mental disorders can be detected, more specifically in children, the more likely chance there is that treatment can have a greater influence on the individuals life, helping them work through the disorder and having an overall better quality of life.
According to the article “the decrease in quality of life, together with the need for treatment place a burden on society via indirect and direct costs” (Bogels & Simon, 2009, p. 625). The authors of this article give an unnerving statistic to the costs that families endure with children who have clinical anxieties with these costs being on average more than 20% higher than families in the general population. With with statistics being available, it gives another reason why early detection and proper treatment are so crucial to,