Skills building seminar: Measuring children mental health

This workshop will be a skills building seminar aimed to present different instruments that have been used in measuring children or adolescents mental health, plus some results to illustrate their pertinence. It aims to render child psychiatric epidemiology accessible by presenting easy to use instruments for children and adolescents that allow to conduct surveys in schools or in other contexts. It will also present and discuss some results in order to stimulate the epidemiological approaches for child mental health problems as well as evaluating access to care,specialized and no specialized, and the relationships between school achievements and mental health problems. This will be based on two major studies: The School Children Mental Health Europe, an EU funded project designed to set up a kit of instruments enabling cross EU comparisons. For this project a literature review allows to select the SDQ (Strengths and Difficulties questionnaire) to be administered to the parents and teachers and the Dominic Interactive, a sort of video game designed to evaluate DSM more commune diagnoses since the children were primary school children 6 to 11 years old.Previously done in France, the project has collected around 1000 children per country in Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey. In addition it measured parental attitudes, domestic accidents, some physical diseases, parental mental health, access to care for mental health problems and some socio demographics. Teachers are asked to evaluate school achievements in addition to their own child mental health evaluation.The project allows evaluating relative concordance on the above instruments results with clinical judgments on separate clinical samples from each of the countries using the DAWBA (a clinical instrument).The lecture proposes to present the instruments and their usage and some of the comparative results among them the relationships between academic performances and mental health problems.The US National Comorbidity Survey Adolescent Supplement (N = 6256), in that survey the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) assessed fifteen lifetime mental disorders and The Sheehan disability scale assessed disorder severity. ID was defined as: 1) IQ ≤ 76, measured using the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test; and 2) an adaptive behavior score ≤76, measured using a validated scale. The lecture will present the instruments and some of the results concerning psychiatric comorbidity and intellectual disability. Key messages Children mental health problems are affecting around 12% of the children and should be evaluated and monitored. Easy to use instruments exist; as children could be surveyed in schools it becomes relatively easy and not too costly to conduct surveys that will integrate risk factors and access to care.