Is there anything new here? The report, The Mental Health of Children and Adolescents with Learning Disabilities in Britain, updates 30-year-old research that revealed a much higher prevalence of mental illness among children with learning difficulties. It combines the findings of two studies in 1999 and 2004.
In a nutshell? More than one in three (36 per cent) young people with learning disabilities also have a psychiatric disorder - six times more than those who do not have learning difficulties. Only a small proportion of the higher rate is due to something inherent about the learning disability. More influential is that learning disabilities and mental illness share some of the same risk factors, the most important being social-based.
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