A Qualitative Study of Autism Policy in Canada: Seeking Consensus on Children's Services.

Canadian autism policy has been unusually contentious, with parents resorting to litigation to secure services for their children in several provinces. To ascertain whether consensus was possible on improving services, we conducted an in-depth qualitative interview study with 39 parents, policymakers and researchers across the country. Parents vividly described the stresses of caring for their children, with considerable sympathy from researchers.

Joining the conversation: newspaper journalists' views on working with researchers.

For health researchers who seek more research use in policy making to improve health and healthcare, working with the news media may represent an opportunity, given the media's pivotal role in public policy agenda-setting. Much literature on science and health journalism assumes a normative stance, focusing on improving the accuracy of news coverage. In this study, we investigated journalists' perspectives and experiences.

Research use in children's mental health policy in Canada: maintaining vigilance amid ambiguity.

Many researchers hope to see the best available research evidence used in policy-making to address important public problems. However, policy often appears to be based on anything but the research evidence, as the problem of conduct disorder (or severe antisocial behaviour in children) shows. In Canada, few children receive effective prevention or treatment programs, and incarceration is overused, despite evidence that it is ineffective and potentially harmful.

A public health strategy to improve the mental health of Canadian children.

Mental health problems are the leading health problems that Canadian children currently face after infancy. At any given time, 14% of children aged 4 to 17 years (over 800,000 in Canada) experience mental disorders that cause significant distress and impairment at home, at school, and in the community. Fewer than 25% of these children receive specialized treatment services.

Child psychiatric epidemiology and Canadian public policy-making: the state of the science and the art of the possible.

Epidemiological studies have characterized the high burden of suffering that child psychiatric disorders cause--14% of children (1.1 million in Canada) have clinically important disorders at any given time. In this review, we summarize the recent research and discuss several unresolved scientific issues that must be addressed to make epidemiology more useful to policy-makers.