Study of adolescents aged 11-13 finds 15% show signs of mental disorder

A STUDY of adolescent children has found that about 15 per cent show signs of having a current mental disorder and that up to 37 per cent had experienced symptoms of mental health problems at some point in their lives.

The findings, which came from a study involving primary school students aged 11-13 in Dublin, Kildare and Meath, are to be presented at a research conference on youth mental health later this week.

More than 1,100 students got parental consent to fill out a questionnaire as part of the Health Research Board-funded study, said researcher Prof Mary Cannon, a consultant psychiatrist at Dublin’s Beaumont Hospital and an associate professor at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.

“It [the questionnaire] gave us a broad outline of how many children may be possibly in the risk area for a later mental illness – it didn’t give specific diagnoses,” she said.

“Nearly 22 per cent seemed to be hitting either the abnormal or the borderline range, indicating ‘amber lights’,” Prof Cannon said.

About 200 children and their parents agreed to do more in- depth interviews, where children were asked specially designed questions to suit their age.

For the study, these parents and children were interviewed separately for about one to 1½ hours each, Prof Cannon said.

“All our interviewers were psychology or medical graduates who had Garda clearance and intensive training in the interview instrument,” she said. “There was often a trainer sitting in on the interviews.”

The interview covered a range of potential mental disorders.

“It focused on depressive disorders, anxiety disorders and we also asked about conduct and behavioural problems and about ADHD-type symptoms,” Prof Cannon said. “There were also some questions about obsessive-compulsive symptoms and psychotic-type symptoms.”

The questions were soft in their approach, she said.

“We might have said: ‘some children may sometimes have experiences where they hear voices when there is no one in the room, have you ever had an experience like that?’ And if the child said ‘maybe’, then you would explore it.”

The study found that many of the children were hearing voices, Prof Cannon said.

“This may not be anything to worry about, but we need to find out more about it.”

An example of a depression question at interview, she said, would be: ‘Have you ever felt sad, blue, down or empty?’

“If the answer was in the affirmative then that would be followed up with more detailed inquiries leading up to more serious questions such as ‘Sometimes children who get upset or feel bad think about dying or even killing themselves. Have you ever had such thoughts?’

“In our sample, 7 per cent had such thoughts,” she said.

The overall finding that about 15 per cent of the children fulfilled criteria for a current mental disorder is in line with a 2001 study in Ireland of 14-15-year-olds, according to Prof Cannon, who also noted that the numbers broadly matched figures from the UK and the US.

“If you take the long view, most adult mental illnesses will have started by the age of 15. We seem to think of these things as adult disorders; they are not, they can start much earlier.”

The study is one of several research projects to be presented this Friday, October 14th, in the College of Surgeons at the conference Emerging Evidence on Youth Mental Health: Multidisciplinary perspectives.

It has been organised by the Association of Child and Adolescent Mental Health.