Adults who had difficult childhoods are not receiving sufficient mental health care

Report Issue

Please complete the required fields.

Your Name

Email

Reason (required)
This post contains broken linksPost has incorrect informationPost has spamCopyright IssueOther

Description

Submit

While 20% of California adults said they had four or more adverse childhoods experiences, nearly 40% of that group reported an unmet mental health need in the last year, according to a new study by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

Adverse childhood experiences referred to physical or emotional neglect; physical, sexual and emotional abuse; and household challenges, including intimate partner violence, divorce or parental separation — or living with anyone involved in the criminal justice system or who is struggling with mental illness and/or substance use disorder.

The study, which uses data from the 2022 California Health Interview Survey, notes that adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, can disrupt healthy brain development and alter how the body responds to future stressful experiences. Preventing ACEs can reduce a broad range of serious conditions (e.g., depression and cardiovascular disease), socioeconomic challenges (e.g., unemployment) and behaviors like heavy drinking and smoking in adulthood.

“This study helps us more clearly understand how our childhoods shape the adults we become, in particular our mental well-being,” said Sean Tan, senior public administration analyst at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and lead author of the study. “If we get better at screening for these adverse childhood experiences as part of people’s routine health care visits, the potential benefits may go beyond better physical and mental health.”

Isolating the findings by smaller demographic groups, researchers found:

Younger adults in California (ages 18–35) are twice as likely as adults 65 and older to have had four or more adverse childhood experiences.

Among adults who had at least one adverse childhood experience, 47.9% of those ages 18–35 reported an unmet need for mental health services in the past year compared to 21.4% of adults 65 and older.

Of Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander adults, 70% reported having had one to three adverse childhood experiences, the greatest proportion of all racial or ethnic groups.

Larger proportions of adults who identified as American Indian or Alaska Native (36.8%), multiracial — two or more races (27.3%), Black or African American (25.9%) or Latino (24.2%) reported having had four or more ACEs when compared to all adults (20.1%).

Mental Health: Keep moving. How Exercise Strengthens Your Brain