Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Personality Structure

Overview

The study plan outlined here represents an investigation of instruments on the patients treated in the acute ward of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University Medical Center Hamburg Eppendorf (UKE). The psychosocial burden of the affected children and adolescents is evident due to the severity of the disorders leading to specific admission. The psychosocial burden can be defined as "psychological, social, or school-occupational functional impairment \[...\] that has arisen as a consequence of a mental disorder, a specific developmental disorder, or an intellectual impairment". The current research project aims to survey the severity of psychosocial distress, personality functioning impairment, and social withdrawal. A better knowledge of these factors may contribute to a more suitable, specialized treatment offer on the acute ward in the medium term.

Children and adolescents who receive inpatient psychiatric treatment are counted among the most impaired in society. In addition to the usually very severe mental disorders, the patient:s often have psychosocial risk factors and traumatic life events in their history. As demand for psychiatric-psychotherapeutic care increases, many inpatient services have been driven to reduce costs, while parallel pressures to measure outcomes and effectiveness have increased. The call for evidence-based practice underscores the need to use valid and reliable measurement tools to capture changes in symptoms and functionality during short-term interventions and their effectiveness. Measuring this change allows for the evaluation of the interventions as a whole and identifying areas for improvement. Acute care units are a particular type of inpatient setting. The main goal of treatment is to stabilize the patient:s by reducing acute psychiatric symptoms, suicide risk, and danger to others. The challenge of care for this target group is to do justice to heterogeneous initial situations and offer customized help for each child and adolescent. The use of instruments to record psychosocial stress and personality disorders increases the chance that at least some of those affected can be prevented from developing a chronic course and thus long-term psychosocial impairment utilizing tailored interventions.