Friends & Colleagues, 

Studies have shown that children in need of mental health care in Nevada have less services than in other states. In fact, the non-profit group Mental Health America ranked Nevada 51st among states and the District of Columbia in seven categories of youths at risk, including those who need help with psychological and emotional disturbances and major depressive disorders. The study also factors in children for whom private insurance doesn’t cover treatment. In today’s newsletter, child psychiatrist Lisa Durette, MD, an assistant professor at the medical school who founded, and serves as the program director for the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship, discusses how a grant program she helps lead, the Pediatric Access Line (PAL), ultimately provides children with more access to mental health care. It allows the state’s primary care doctors, the physicians who generally first see children with mental health problems, to phone into a kind of hotline (PAL) staffed by mental health professionals for recommendations on how to treat troubled children.