Objective: The importance of preventive mental health services in child psychiatry (esp. in the infant psychiatry) is better understood day by day. Similar to whole world, in our country, the causes, prevalence and distribution of the psychiatric and developmental problems in early childhood are not adequately investigated yet. In this study, we aimed to investigate the distribution and frequency of psychiatric complaints and the factors that affect psychiatric approval in a clinical and community sample of 1-4 year of children.
Methods: The Clinical sample (n:207) and randomized and stratified community sample (n:462) are assessed in terms of presence and frequency of psychiatric and developmental problems. All complaints are collected and classified into 20 groups of symptoms and reassessed for absence or presence. Sociademographic Assessment Form, Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and Brief Infant andToddler Social Emotional Assessment (BITSEA) are completed.
Results: In the community sample 37.7% of mothers and 27.5% of fathers replied as “Yes” to the item “Does your child have any psychiatric and/or developmental problem?”. In the clinical sample the rate of “Yes” was found to be 95.2% for mothers. In the community sample, in the decreasing order, most prevalent complaints were reported to be “sleep problems” (9.7%), “fears” (9.5%), “harm to others” (5.8%), “language and speech problems” (5.0%). On the other hand, in the clinical sample most prevalent complaints were “language retardation” (40.3%), “hyperactivity” (20.9%), “aggressive behaviors” (19.9%), “harm to others” (18.4%), “stubbornness” (16.0%). While there were no statistical difference between clinical and community sample in terms of “fears”, “language problems”, “sleep problems”, “inpatience”, “jealousy” and “poor attention”, all other 14 groups of symptoms were found to be significantly more in the clinical sample. Logistic regression analysis to assess predictive factors of psychiatric approval revealed that some factors [esp, “male gender” (p<0.05), “denial of orders” (p<0.01), “language retardation” (p<0.01), “aggresiveness” (p<0.01), and “hyperactivity” (p<0.01)] significantly predict the psychiatric approval.
Conclusion: Previous studies1,2,3 report that 15-45% of the 1-4 year old children have psychiatric and/or neurodevelopmental problems and only a small part of them are brougth to the psychiatry clinics. Our study reveal that mothers are more sensitive to these problems and report more compared to fathers. On the other hand, some symptoms increase the possibility of approval. In addition, similar rates of some symptoms between the community and clinical sample were interesting and need further investigation.