TELEVISION REVIEW: HBO LOOKS AT ‘KIDS IN CRISIS’ IN DOCUMENTARY

“Kids in Crisis,” an hourlong documentary airing on Home Box Office this month (including Sunday at 11:30 p.m.), is a casualty report from the teen wars. “No other generation in American history has been more self-destructive,” narrator Patrick Cronin says in introducing a series of interviews with some of the thousands of young people who are hospitalized each year for psychiatric treatment.

To see children in such trouble and pain, and their parents agonizing over what went wrong, is poignant. But producer Ann Hassett and director Robert Niemack have focused on the effects rather than the causes of this national tragedy.

Why it exists, what can be done about it and whether there are early-warning signs that might help parents avoid it are questions that go unaddressed.