Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ARTICLESFactors Associated With Adolescent Mental Health Service Need and Utilization
Section snippets
Participants
The sample used in this article is part of a larger study on psychopathology and mental health service use in a Dutch national sample of children and adolescents. We will describe the selection of the original sample (involving subjects aged 4–18 years) before describing the sample used in the present study.
The target population for the original study consisted of all 4- to 18-year-olds who were of Dutch nationality and living in the Netherlands. Respondents were recruited using a stratified
RESULTS
Thirty-five adolescents (54% boys; 46% girls) reported a referral for mental health services in the 12 months preceding the assessment. This represents 3.1% of the total sample. Of the 209 adolescents who scored in the deviant range of the YSR Total Problems scale, only 7.7% had been referred for mental health services. However, of the 35 adolescents who were referred, 45% were in the deviant range on the YSR Total Problems scale.
Of the total sample, 425 adolescents (37.9%) perceived themselves
DISCUSSION
Of our total sample of Dutch adolescents, 3.1% were referred for mental health services. This figure is lower than the 5.8% reported by Saunders et al. (1994) and the 7% reported by Sourander et al. (2001). These differences may be ascribed to differences in definitions of mental health service use, differences in prevalence rates for adolescent psychopathology between nations (Verhulst et al., 1993; Verhulst et al., unpublished, 2002), or differences in the organization of mental health
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Supported by the Dutch Ministry of Welfare and Health, Rijswijk, the Netherlands, and the Sophia Foundation of Medical Research, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.