The mental health system is impacted by extreme delays in the provision of care, even in the face of suicidal behaviour. The failure to address mental health issues in a timely fashion result in a dependence on acute mental health services. Improvement to the mental health care system is impacted by the paucity of information surrounding client profiles admitted to inpatient settings. Using archival data from 10,865 adolescents 12–18 years of age (Mage = 14.87, SDage = 1.77), this study aimed to examine the characteristics of adolescents admitted to psychiatric inpatient services in Ontario, Canada. Multivariate binary logistic regression revealed that adolescents reporting interpersonal polyvictimization, greater family dysfunction and higher risk of suicide and self-harm had a greater likelihood of an inpatient mental health admission. The interRAI Child and Youth Mental Health assessment can be used for care planning and early intervention to support adolescents and their families before suicide risk is imminent.
Various biological, social, psychological, and environmental factors impact children and youth living with mental health problems across their lifespan. To meet the wide-ranging challenges of mental illness, service system integration is needed to improve efficiencies and reduce fragmentation. Unfortunately, the mental health system has been plagued by the lack of coordination across services. There is a general consensus that mental health service delivery must ensure a child or youth’s needs are addressed in a collaborative, coordinated, and seamless manner. A key element to successful integration is the development of a comprehensive standardized screening and assessment system. Numerous assessments have been developed to assess child mental health and functioning, but they typically have a very narrow focus with limited use and utility. Not only does this reduce the ability to take a life course perspective to mental health, but this uncoordinated approach also results in redundancies in information collected, additional resources, and increased assessor burden for children, youth, and their families. The interRAI child and youth mental health assessment suite was developed in response to the need for an integrated mental health system for young persons. This suite includes screening and assessment instruments for in-patient and community settings, emergency departments, educational settings, and youth justice custodial facilities. The instruments form a mental health information system intentionally designed to work in an integrated fashion beginning in infancy, and incorporate key applications such as care planning, outcome measurement, resource allocation, and quality improvement. The design of these assessment tools and their psychometric properties are reviewed. Data is then presented using examples related to interpersonal trauma, illustrating the use and utility of the integrated suite, along with the various applications of these assessment systems.
School disruption (SD) places students at risk of early school departure and other negative psychological outcomes. Based on the data derived from a sample of Ontario children and youth, this study aims to identify risk factors associated with SD among 1,241 school-aged students. A logistic regression model revealed that substance use, family functioning, Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and experiencing bullying, significantly predicted SD. Substance use and family functioning resulted in the largest contributions to SD when holding other variables constant. This study provides supporting evidence of risk factors predicting SD and suggests that mental health and school personnel should consider family functioning and substance use in particular, when creating interventions to decrease premature school termination.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.