Ontario Child Health Study Getting Revival

In 1983, the late Dr. Dan Offord co-authored and led the Ontario Child Health Study, the largest and most comprehensive child mental health study of its kind at the time. Thirty years later, they're going even bigger.

Dr. Dan Offord (source: offordcentre.com)

CBC News reports that the study will expand its sample to 10,000 children from 7,020 families across Ontario. The study will also increase it's age range on the tail end by 2 years so now children between the ages of 4 and 18 years old will be included.

Study showed that 1 in 5 children have a mental health problem.

The original study used a sample of 3,294 children from 1,869 different families and determined that one in five children from the study had some type of mental health problem. (These conclusions drew worldwide attention and earned the study a reputation for being the most significant population-based study on children's mental health conducted anywhere. It became a model study for researchers of child health for the years to follow.)

We hope this study will once again bring the topic of child mental health issues to the forefront of society. We hope this study once again proves mental health affects more people than we think it does. 

Above all, we hope this study can once again start an open dialogue about mental health. Want to start that conversation sooner? We do, too. Drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter!

How to spot signs of a mental health concern in children: