Doctors Focus on Newest Challenge: Teens in Ill-Health
Ephebiatrics.
The word has the ring of some established medical specialty along the lines of endocrinology or obstetrics. But it is actually the freshly minted medical term for the study of a newly recognized problem: the declining health of adolescents.
“Ephebiatrics” was scrawled in large letters across a blackboard at an all-day conference on health problems of teen-agers, held Saturday at the new and not-yet-occupied Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar.
Physicians and specialists from UCLA, which will use Olive View as a teaching hospital, and counselors from a Santa Monica crisis center reeled off a chilling list of statistics about epidemics of suicide, drug abuse and teen-age pregnancy that have necessitated the creation of a separate specialty.
About 50 doctors, nurses, school nurses and social workers, most of them from the San Fernando Valley, gathered in a conference room at the pristine county-run hospital, which was otherwise empty.
“Our adolescents are in a lot of trouble,” said Dr. Sidney Cohen, a UCLA professor of psychiatry.
Pregnancies and Abortions
A 1985 study of 37 nations showed that the United States has the highest rate of teen-age pregnancies and teen-age abortions in the industrialized world, said Adrienne Davis, coordinator of the health education program at UCLA. More than half the pregnancies are out of wedlock. And the United States is the only nation in which the pregnancy rate in this age group has recently increased, she said.
For a variety of reasons, adolescents are suffering from a rising death rate, Cohen said. “The 15-to-24-year-old age group is the only age group over the past 20 years that has had an increase in death rate. . . . This is the first time in the history of this country that we’ve had an increase in death rate of any age group.”
He said the causes of death that have risen the fastest are suicide, accidents and homicides, many of which can be linked to a simultaneous rise in drug and alcohol abuse. “We’re seeing people in their 20s with cirrhosis of the liver,” Cohen said, adding that it takes 10 years for cirrhosis to develop.
As new problems have developed for adolescents, such as the growing probability of an AIDS epidemic, social and medical services for them has not kept pace, said Dr. Milton Greenblatt, who directs the UCLA/San Fernando Valley Program in Psychiatry and will become chief of psychiatry when Olive View opens.
Along with the increase in ailments has come an increase in social problems such as homelessness, he said.
Hida Avent, project director for Stepping Stone Youth Crisis Center in Santa Monica, which has six beds for homeless children from 7 to 17, said there are no accurate statistics for the number of teen-agers who have run away from or were thrown out of homes or institutions.
Estimates of the number of homeless teen-agers on Los Angeles County streets range from 2,000 to 20,000, she said. The county has only 44 beds to provide a short-term haven for such children, she said. Besides the six beds at Stepping Stone, there are six in the Valley--for young women only--and six in the South Bay area; the rest are in Hollywood.
Median Age Now 13
At Stepping Stone, she said, the median age of residents has dropped from 15 to 13 in the last three years. “We had a 9-year-old runaway from Nebraska last month,” Avent said. “We turned away 198 kids in January.”
These adolescents are fraught with psychological and physical ailments, said Dr. Julia Robertson, director of Olive View’s adolescent psychiatry unit. Robertson recently landed $112,000 in grants from the state Department of Mental Health to begin a comprehensive study of the mental health of homeless adolescents.
Olive View psychiatrists and psychologists will conduct interviews with homeless adolescents in Hollywood and Venice, which are two of the most popular destinations for runaways in the country, Robertson said.
Teen-agers admitted to Olive View’s psychiatric emergency room and in-patient unit will be carefully studied, and their mental health compared to a similar group of adolescents with a stable home life.
After innumerable delays, Olive View is scheduled to get its final round of licensing inspections in the next two weeks and to open in May, said Dr. Irwin Ziment, chief of medicine and the organizer of the seminar.
