A $15 million gift from philanthropists Marc and Lynne Benioff will go toward expanding mental health services at the Oakland children’s hospital that bears their name, in an effort to bring much-needed psychiatric care to East Bay kids and families suffering from lack of resources.

The donation is the final part of a promised $50 million gift by the San Francisco couple to UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland. The Benioffs have donated a total of $200 million to UCSF’s two children’s hospitals, in Oakland and San Francisco.

The last installment is not an especially large part of the total, but UCSF officials said it will provide invaluable “seed money” to invest in pediatric mental health, which experts have identified as a national public health crisis. Services for children with mental illness are woefully inadequate in the East Bay and almost all other parts of the country, leaving potentially millions of young people undiagnosed and undertreated.

UCSF will put the $15 million toward hiring child psychiatrists — ideally doubling the number of patient visits possible each year — and improving resources for pediatricians, who are often the first line of treatment for children with mental health problems. The money also will pay for increased training programs for young psychiatrists.

“This gift is extraordinary. It is going to put us in a place very different from where we’ve been, and it’s going to make a real difference,” said Dr. Bryan King, vice president for child behavioral health services at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals. “But it’s a big job that we need to take care of.”

Rates of childhood mental illness have been climbing in recent years, and studies show that about 20 percent of children age 18 and under suffer some type of mental health condition, such as depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress.

Suicide rates among young people are especially alarming. Since 2000, the rate for boys and men age 10 to 24 has risen 20 percent; among girls and women in the same age group it’s climbed 80 percent to the highest prevalence on record in that demographic.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among all young people in that age group.

But the number of people trained to treat these children has not increased to match the need. Studies have found that the country would need 40,000 child and adolescent psychiatrists to treat everyone who needs help — but there are only 8,000 such providers, said Dr. Petra Steinbuchel, a child psychiatrist at UCSF. Many communities do not have a single child psychiatrist; even larger cities often have only one or two.

Since it first opened, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland has always had one to three psychiatrists on staff, said King. The new money will help the hospital hire six more psychiatrists — a massive increase, but still far short of what the community could actually use, he said.

Jennifer Weiss of Concord has three children who have needed mental health care. For her two youngest, she spent years trying to find psychiatrists near their home who were able to treat their complex needs, including autism and severe anxiety and depression.

She had been told that the Oakland children’s hospital had the best services, but when she tried to take her older child there, she learned the wait list was two years. Later, when she wanted to bring in the younger child, the wait list was so long that the hospital wasn’t even taking new names.

Eventually she got both children into psychiatric care at the hospital, and for one of them, she says it was lifesaving. Her older child finally got a formal diagnosis after more than five years of being mislabeled and over- or under-treated.

The younger child is still dealing with significant challenges, but Weiss takes comfort in having a team of doctors she can call for help.

“Definitely we are right now on a good track with them,” Weiss said. “But it took several years for each of them to get the help they needed. It took a lot of time, and a lot of damage was done in the process.”

Dr. Michael Anderson, president of UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals, said the new gift would go toward programs that will immediately improve services for children and families, starting with the hiring of additional child psychiatrists.

The other key resource to fund is training and other services for pediatricians. Children with mental health issues often are seen first by their primary care doctors, and it’s those physicians who are likely to refer them for more advanced psychiatric care. But pediatricians aren’t trained much, if at all, in psychiatric conditions.

Ideally, pediatricians could be trained to identify mental health problems and even treat some less serious conditions, referring the more severe cases to psychiatrists as needed. That would potentially ease up some bottlenecks in mental health services.

Mental health experts at UCSF said the $15 million will undoubtedly improve care and — hopefully — inspire gifts from other donors. But they also recognize that the shortage of mental health resources is severe, and can’t be resolved quickly or without massive financial investments.

“In the short term, we were looking at where we could make the biggest impact,” Anderson said. “But we’ve got a lot of work to do. There are other challenges that lie ahead.”

Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: eallday@

sfchronicle.com