Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ReviewThe Prevalence of Mental Illness in Homeless Children: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Section snippets
Method
This review conforms to recommendations from the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement14 and the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination’s (CRD) Guidance for Undertaking Reviews.15 The protocol of this review has been registered with the PROSPERO register at the CRD (CRD#42014007519).
Literature Search
Our electronic searches identified 1,608 records (i.e., abstracts). In addition, we identified 13 full-text publications not indexed in the electronic databases (e.g., technical reports, peer-reviewed articles). After removing duplicates, 1,276 abstracts were screened, of which 956 were excluded. Full-text publications of the remaining 320 records were retrieved and examined. Twelve were included in the review (Table 121, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 and Table 28, 11, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30).
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Discussion
This systematic review appraised and synthesized the evidence on the prevalence of mental health/behavioral disorders in homeless preschool- and school-age children. It is the first study to present a meta-analysis that compared the risk of having a mental health problem between homeless and low-income–housed school-age children. To our knowledge, no systematic reviews have been conducted on the mental health needs of homeless children. The few systematic reviews of mental illness in the
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This article was supported by the Center for Social Innovation.
Disclosure: Dr. Bassuk, Dr. Tsertsvadze, and Ms. Richard report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.