Mental Health Problems in Childhood Linked to Adult Woes

It is accustomed that psychiatric problems are dealt with once the first consequences start to show up. Lead author of the study and associate professor of psychiatry, William Copeland, acknowledged that a child’s environment does have an impact on their abilities as adults. These includes having criminal charges, addictions, early pregnancies, education failures, residential instability and problems getting or keeping a job. The study is ongoing and followed the participants from childhood through their adulthood, most of which are now in their 30s. “The burden is then later seen in adulthood, when these problems become costly public health and social issues”.

Participants with childhood psychiatric disorders and those with subthreshold problems in childhood, made up close to 80 percent of participants with adverse adult outcomes and close to 90 percent of participants with two or more adverse adult outcomes, the results also indicate.

A research has unveiled about the hardships of a child having mental health issues.

For their study, the team from Duke University looked at data collected from more than 1.400 subjects who resided in 11 different North Carolina counties.

Psychiatric problems often develop during childhood years and continue into adulthood, however, the new study suggests that psychiatric disorders in children have the potential to negatively affect their adult lives even if the disorder itself does not continue on into adulthood.

What’s worse, the authors point out that not even children who’ve only experienced mild cases of passive episodes of mental illnesses can escape this fate. Copeland said that ” When it comes to key psychiatric problems – depression, anxiety, behavior disorders – there are successful interventions and prevention programs”.

The researchers explain that these children have very mild forms of depression when they are young and this is why they don’t get diagnosed and, consequently, don’t benefit from proper treatment.

The researchers found out that when compared with children who did not have any psychiatric issues, those children that did were six times as likely to wind up with difficulties in adulthood, which is a staggering statistic, and it shows just how severe even minor psychiatric issues can become.

“As a society we’re prone to think of childhood as a relatively carefree life, obviously with exceptions, and most of the mental disorders you think about are in adults, except ADHD and autism, but the whole gambit are there in childhood”, says Klein, who was not part of the study.

Copeland feels the study is proof that mental health issues need to be addressed without stigma, and as early as possible. 31 percent had milder forms that were below the threshold for diagnosis, and 42.7 percent had no identified problems. Thus, the extant studies of the predictive association between child and adult psychopathology raise as many questions as they answer. Out of all of the children with the milder psychiatric indicators, 41.9 percent had at least one issue in adulthood that complicated success, and 23.2 percent had more than one issue.