May 17, 2016 3 min read

Anyone who has ever raised a teenager, been a teenager, or has even watched “The Breakfast Club,” is well aware it’s a turbulent period fraught with crises that seem cataclysmic but turn out to be trivial when seen in the more settled light of adulthood.

Most teenagers are able to navigate the tumult of their adolescence without undue difficulty and become healthy and productive adults. However, there are some who suffer more than the typical quota of slings and arrows. Some become mired in depression, while others first begin to show symptoms of lifelong mental-health difficulties. Some teens and young adults don’t make it through this passage – suicide is the third-leading cause of death for those aged between 15 and 24, behind accidents and homicide.

Prompted by students in his district who have ended their lives, state Rep. Dan Miller of Mt. Lebanon has introduced a bill that would mandate that every student in Pennsylvania receive a mental-health checkup by the time they turn 14, including a screening for depression.

It’s designed to steer students who could be struggling with mental-health difficulties toward treatment, and to let parents know about steps that can be taken in their homes.

“For brain health issues, we are waiting until something horrible happens all too often for us to get involved,” Miller said.

“You can’t just look at somebody, unlike physical health, and understand whether or not they have a mental-health issue that needs to be addressed. It is not what you just see, and we have to embrace and understand that.”

Miller’s measure, which has bipartisan support, is undoubtedly well-meaning. Nevertheless, screening teens for mental-health problems has its share of critics, and, if screenings become part of the regimen of the commonwealth’s students, they should be handled with the utmost care.

On the one hand, supporters argue screenings fulfill their intended function and save lives. A 2011 Columbia University study found that teens who were screened at six public high schools in Wisconsin between 2005 and 2009 found that about 75 percent of students who were at risk for serious mental-health problems were not receiving treatment, and that most of those students did end up visiting a doctor or therapist within 90 days of their screening.

James Mazza, a psychologist at the Seattle campus of the University of Washington, told The Los Angeles Times that a screening is “a measure to say, ‘How are things going in your life?’ Then a counselor can follow up and do a risk-assessment interview or make an appropriate referral to someone who can do the risk assessment.

If schools don’t screen, their students don’t have the opportunity to proactively identify themselves as at risk. On the flip side, not screening means we’ll do nothing and stick our heads in the sand and hope for the best, even though we know a significant number of youth experience these mental-health issues.”

On the other hand, there are legitimate concerns that screenings could lead to an overdiagnosis of mental illness, and too many young people being placed on medication.

Others said students would be stigmatized if a screening shows them to be at risk for mental-health problems, even if further investigation finds that is not the case.

Tossing more and more pills at kids is not the answer.

But neither is looking the other way.

The best approach is to screen students, but practice caution in how the information is used and how follow-up treatment is handled.