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It all happened so fast that if you blinked you might well have missed the recent brouhaha over the latest public awareness campaign by the Child Study Center, a mental health treatment, advocacy and training institute at New York University. Designed to get across the message that untreated mental disorders hold children “hostage,” the ads were made to look like ransom notes that kidnappers had seemingly scribbled on lined paper or clumsily glued together with letters cut out of newspapers.

Their texts began “We have your son”; “We are in possession of your son”; “We have your daughter.”

“We are destroying his ability for social interaction and driving him into a life of complete isolation,” read the note signed Asperger Syndrome. “We will make sure he will no longer be able to care for himself or interact socially as long as he lives,” threatened Autism. “We are making him squirm and fidget until he is a detriment to himself and those around him,” said A.D.H.D. (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).

Every ransom note came with an admonition: “This is only the beginning.” “It’s up to you now.” “Ignore this and your kid will pay.” And, at the bottom of each was a kicker: “Don’t let a psychiatric disorder take your child.”

The ads were barely out when the outcry against them began. Furious e-mails and phone calls from advocacy groups and individual parents of children with A.D.H.D. and autism spectrum disorders flooded the office of Dr. Harold S. Koplewicz, director of the Child Study Center and chair of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at New York University.

The critics said the ads were overly negative. They said they made the children they described seem “damaged,” even “criminal.” They felt they were insulting to children and to their parents.

The public outcry was a truly troubling turn of events for an advocacy organization dedicated to increasing public awareness of children’s mental health issues, to bringing more and better treatments to children and, above all, to reducing the stigma that continues to this day to keep children and their parents from getting the help and support they need.

For Dr. Koplewicz, author of the 1996 book, “It’s Nobody’s Fault: New Hope and Help for Difficult Children and Their Parents,” the criticism was particularly painful. The ads were meant, he told me on Tuesday, to raise public awareness of the ravages wrought by untreated mental disorders — not to cast aspersion upon diagnosed children and their parents. They were meant to draw attention to the fact that these problems are widespread — 15 million children in America, he said, suffer from diagnosable psychiatric or learning disorders — and are, overwhelmingly, going untreated, with only one in three white children, one in five African American and one in seven Hispanic children receiving sufficient care.

The campaign was simply meant to get across the point that “these kids are not living the childhoods they were supposed to have or in my opinion they were entitled to have,” Dr. Koplewicz said. “Obviously we hit a nerve that we didn’t want to hit.”

The hit was, perhaps, predictable. The nerve might have been avoided. If only the Child Study Center had realized that phrases like “it’s up to you,” “your kid will pay,” and “don’t let…” would make parents feel personally attacked right where such attacks would hurt the most.

For parents of children with “issues” — psychiatric, developmental, neurological, whatever you want to call them — guilt is a constant life companion. We no longer believe that “refrigerator mothers” cause autism by being cold and withholding, or that mothers who give their children “mixed messages” cause schizophrenia, but we’ve replaced these outmoded beliefs with a whole new slew of fears and self-flaggelating forms of blame.

If a child has an inherited disorder, parents blame their faulty genes. They blame immunizations they authorized, or tuna they ate in pregnancy, or marital conflicts that poisoned their homes with conflict and anxiety.

Mothers and fathers blame themselves when they parent their challenging children less than optimally. They curse themselves every time they react to difficult moments with anger or frustration instead of warmly supportive unconditional love.

Most, lacking access to pediatricians who can take the time to properly support and guide them, and lacking the kind of health insurance that could pay for top-level, comprehensive care, are left on their own to wade through the morass of information, advice, marketing and myth that surrounds them. Then, if they drag their feet in getting their children diagnosed, if they spend years waiting to see if their kids will outgrow their “quirky” behaviors, if they hesitate, out of distaste for the medico-industrial complex, they end up wanting to shoot themselves for the time lost and the early intervention opportunities they let slip by.

I met a father a few weeks ago at a children’s event who had moved with his family recently to Washington, D.C., in order to secure the best possible services for his son, who has high-functioning autism. The family had previously been living in a Midwestern suburb where the choice of services was highly limited. They had done everything they could for him there, but they knew that it was too little. And now that they had him enrolled in a special school for children with learning and developmental disabilities in the D.C. area, they feared that it was too late.

The school was wonderful. Their son was making great strides. But, the father told me, “You can’t imagine the guilt we feel, every day, thinking that we could have done this earlier.”

This guilt is the curse of a time when so much is known about early intervention and effective therapies, and so little is placed within the reach of average families. It’s the blight that’s visited upon a country where medical science has far outpaced public awareness and the blame game continues to replace a sense of shared social responsibility.

Making parents feel guilty, at fault, or in some way responsible for their children’s diseases or disorders was, unquestioningly, the last thing that the Child Study Center sought to do. But when you have a population of people already brimming over with self-blame and guilt, when you have a group of parents whose every nerve ending is exposed, it’s all too easy to spark a crisis. The world of children’s mental health issues is a minefield right now, and it doesn’t take much to trigger full-blown conflagrations.

On Wednesday, the Child Study Center issued a statement saying it had made the decision to end the “ransom notes” ad campaign. No more ads will be posted, and those already up will come down as soon as it’s possible. Early next year, the Center will hold an online “town hall” meeting to draw outside voices into the planning of its next public awareness campaign.

Maybe some of the fear and guilt and shame will come out into the open then. And then, maybe, they’ll start to fade.