“School Children Mental Health Europe“
Children's health determines largely the health of the future population. Mental health in children has been proven to predict social exclusion; in addition most of the children suffering from some external disorders are suffering from anxiety or depressive disorders as well. This project aims to build up a set of indicators across eight different member states in their own language in order to be able to collect and monitor children's mental health and its major risk factors in an efficient and low cost way in each country. Indicators based on measurements of child's health are important for identifying progress, problems and priorities, changes over time and newly emergent issues. Among child measures, mental health measures have been obviously under developed. In one of the rare attempts to set up child health indicators for Europe, suicidal attempts have been proposed as a unique indicator to monitor child mental health. Indeed, this will be useful to monitor adolescents' and preadolescents' mental health, but it will not monitor younger children's mental health at all. This project aims to fill the gap and develop and experiment a set of mental health child indicators that could be used to monitor child's mental health across time and places all over EU. This has to be done in the context of a community co-funding set-up in order to support the diverse member states and candidates to participate in a project whose aims are to underline the feasibility of measuring child's mental health and the necessity to do it in a comparable manner across member states and over time, in order to be able to monitor it and therefore to fully benefit from evidence-based preventive measures dedicated to the European child population. The project will be divided in two phases: the first one will be used to translate the different instruments for the three informants and validate them with clinical advice (100 children by country); the second phase will result in a pilot survey on 1500 children (6 to 10 years old) by country. The project includes two major phases. For the first phase, each country expert will participate in the child mental health instruments selection according to the relevant literature and with the help of external experts which have extensive experience with these instruments. Then, a validation study will be carried out in the seven participating countries. In each of the countries, 100 children from 6 to 11 years old will be assessed twice: one with the proposed survey instruments presented by a non clinician interviewer and one by an experienced clinician (5 years minimum of child clinical practice) who will be a child psychiatrist or a psychologist using a standardised psychiatric questionnaire. Both measures will be compared with relevant statistical test (kappa) and instruments will be selected according to these results. The second phase is the survey which will be conducted under the country expert supervision. This survey will randomise schools in urban, rural and small cities areas with a representation of deprived areas. 60 private as well as public schools will be randomised. 25 children will be randomly selected in a second time (multiple stage randomisation) in each primary school level. Each country will recruit 2 or 3 field workers having some experience with the school milieu in order to facilitate the field work. These field workers will contact the schools, make appointments to visit them and randomise the children who will have to pass the test. They will collect the corresponding teachers' questionnaires before leaving and leave them the parents' questionnaire with a stamped envelope, so they could return it to the country team. Leuphana University of Lüneburg will carry out this project for Germany
Further information
Time scale: 2008-2011
Project Partner:
- Fondation d’entreprise MGEN pour la santé publique, France
- Fundaciô privada per la recerca i la docència Sant Joan de Déu (FSJD), Spain
- Sosiaali-ja terveysalan tutkimus-ja kehitffimiskeskus / National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health (STAKES), Finland
- Associazione Università Europea del Mediterraneo (UEM), Italy
- Liga Românà Pentru SAnâtate Mintalà I Romanian/ League for Mental Health (RLMH), Romania
- Stichting Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen (RU), Netherlands
- Leuphana Universitât Lüneburg (ULG), Germany
- Child Development Centre of Vilnius University (CDC VUCH), Lithuania
- Fondacia Za Tchoveshki Otnoshenia / Foundation for Human Relations (Tchoveshki Otnoshenia), Bulgaria
- Yeniden Saglik ve E~itim Dernegi / Yeniden Health and Education Society (Yeniden),Turkey.
Project staff