We are all familiar with the problems facing Scots in their later years - dementia, frailty and the old Scottish problems of heart disease and stroke - and that the National Health Service is struggling is cope.

But there is a crisis at the other end of life too. In any given year, one in five children will have a mental health condition and the number of children and teenagers referred to mental health services in the last two years has risen by more a third.

And yet Scotland's mental health services for children and adolescents are falling short. Hundreds of children and young people are being treated in unsuitable adult wards, or are being sent miles away from their families to England for treatment. There is also no secure inpatient provision in Scotland for children and young people with mental health conditions and hundreds of under 16s have to wait longer than six months to start treatment.

A number of charities are doing superb work to bridge the gap, but Sophie Pilgrim, director of Kindred Scotland, which supports families including children with additional needs, says mental health services for children are at breaking point and that public funding must be increased.

The Scottish Government did recently announce that mental health services are to receive an extra £85m for improvements over the next five years, and that some of the funding will be used to provide more care for children and young people. But the proportion of the NHS Scotland budget dedicated to young people suffering mental health difficulties is less than half a per cent and less money is spent in Scotland than England.

In the face of this funding shortfall, some of the organisations which care for vulnerable young people have now joined forces to call for extra investment and it is a call which this newspaper supports. The Scottish Children's Services Coalition, an alliance of independent and third sector organisations which work with vulnerable children, is asking the Scottish Government to increase the proportion of the NHS budget dedicated to young people with mental health problems to one per cent, and their case is strong.

Not only do the figures point to a large number of young people suffering from difficulties such as anorexia, the evidence suggests that early intervention works and that with properly tailored support, most of them will go on to lead healthy and well adjusted lives.

But the support costs money and more is required to help speed up diagnosis, cut waiting times, and prevent the use of non-specialist units. If we are to seriously tackle mental health problems among children and young people, more also has to be spent on education, prevention and research - an area that has been subject to severe cuts by the Scottish Government.

The potential pay-back is huge. Spend money now on helping and treating troubled teenagers and we could prevent them ending up in psychiatric wards or prisons later in life. As Sophie Pilgrim of Kindred Scotland says, a society should be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable citizens. But at the moment Scotland must be found wanting.