Abstract
Background:Little is known about the scope of problems driving referrals to child and adolescent psychiatry services. Identifying the full range of mental disorders affecting a particular child can help triage the child to a clinician with the appropriate level of expertise. The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) is an easy-to-use assessment tool that may provide invaluable information regarding the severity of the presenting complaints and also aid in the referral process.Objective:To assess the utility of the CBCL to gain insights into the type of clinical problems driving referrals of youth to an outpatient pediatric psychiatry clinic.Method:The sample consisted of 418 newly referred youth 4-18 years of age of both sexes. Parents completed the CBCL assessing psychopathology and competence. Rates of patients with elevated T-scores on each scale were calculated for the whole group and stratified by sex and age (≤12 versus >12).Results:The CBCL identified high rates of psychopathology affecting referred youth. It also provided information on the type of suspected disorders affecting a particular child as well as their severity, critical information to guide likely differing clinical needs and therapeutic approaches. It also helped identify a high number of youth affected with multiple psychopathological conditions, likely to require a high level of clinical attention. Overall, males were significantly more impaired than females but there were no major differences between children and adolescents.Conclusions:The CBCL can aid in the identification of individual and comorbid mental disorders affecting youth seeking mental health services by providing specific information about the presence and the severity of specific suspected disorder. These findings have implications for prioritizing scarce resources in child mental health and for improved consideration of the complexity of clinical presentations to pediatric psychiatry programs of any type.
Highlights
There is a clear recognition of the limited resources available in child and adolescent psychiatry across the world
The main aim of this study was to assess the utility of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) for characterizing the type of psychopathology and dysfunction affecting youth referred to a child psychiatry clinic in a manner that would be useful as a screening tool in clinical settings
Findings reveal that the CBCL clinical scales identify specific disorders with very different clinical needs, thereby providing clinicians with useful information to begin to address patients’ individual clinical needs
Summary
There is a clear recognition of the limited resources available in child and adolescent psychiatry across the world. Results: The CBCL identified high rates of psychopathology affecting referred youth It provided information on the type of suspected disorders affecting a particular child as well as their severity, critical information to guide likely differing clinical needs and therapeutic approaches. It helped identify a high number of youth affected with multiple psychopathological conditions, likely to require a high level of clinical attention. These findings have implications for prioritizing scarce resources in child mental health and for improved consideration of the complexity of clinical presentations to pediatric psychiatry programs of any type
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