Original in Spanish: Prevalencia de la depresión y custodias
In 2017 the prevalence of clinical depression cases in the US was on the order of 5 to 7%. Of those, 64% were severe with major impairment.
So the dangerous ones who should have their kids taken away for being depressed would be 1% to 4.5% depending on the age range. Without them having done anything to the child; just preventively.
How many children are killed or harmed by a parent who has depression? The figures are probably different depending on whether the parents are still together. I only know of this one case, though surely there are more. So one would have to check whether the drawbacks of investing in prevention are eclipsed by the advantages.
Moreover, 10% of mothers have postpartum depression, of which 3.5% is major depression. Careful with what severity of depression we define for taking custodies away from people who have never done anything to the kid, because 3.5% of newborns is a lot of newborns.
There are about 20 child homicides a year in Spain; that’s the total, whoever killed them (parents, grandparents or the greengrocer, they’re all in there), and it also includes involuntary homicide (a car accident where the baby dies, for example).
Taking custody away from someone is not free, not for that someone nor for the child. It’s very serious and there are lasting scars. In the cases I’ve seen of custody being removed from someone I knew, there was a lot of monitoring over a long time before doing something irreversible; only in one case involving risk of clitoral ablation were the girls taken the same day, preventively, to sort things out before really knowing what was going on. That seems RIGHT to me; the state caring for kids is not free of scars for the children, nor for the parents for that matter…
What I’m really getting at is that there are a lot of people with major clinical depression. I have no data on how many parents kill their children because of depression, but this case is the only one I’ve heard of.
The treatment of depression in public healthcare could be improved, both at the diagnosis level and at the follow-up/treatment level. Depression patients who can’t pay for their own psychiatrist are fairly abandoned. In fact, if parents have money and can’t cope with caring for their kids, they’ll have it much easier to delegate. Perhaps by identifying the risk group and investing there (caring for the kid alone, with depression, without help, without resources… whatever the assessor decides), it would be enough to care better for the sick person, plus the current mechanisms to protect the minor by removing custody in the cases already described today. Caring better for the adult would only help raise the alarm earlier if necessary, which is already a lot in terms of prevention, and has no downsides.
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/major-depression.shtml
(Facebook, 2019-09-21)