AUTHOR=Peck Allison , Hutchinson Marie , Provost Steve 

TITLE=Childhood adversity, emergent psychopathology, and adolescent-to-parent violence: Process mining trajectories from police and health service administrative data

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

VOLUME=2

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/child-and-adolescent-psychiatry/articles/10.3389/frcha.2023.1074861

DOI=10.3389/frcha.2023.1074861

ISSN=2813-4540

ABSTRACT=<sec><title>Aim</title><p>To discover developmental risk trajectories for emerging mental health problems among a sample of adolescent family violence offenders to inform service delivery focused on early preventative interventions with children and their families.</p></sec><sec><title>Design</title><p>A retrospective case-series design employing data linkage.</p></sec><sec><title>Setting</title><p>An Australian regional location.</p></sec><sec><title>Participants</title><p>Adolescents (born between 1994 and 2006) issued a legal action by the NSW Police Force for an adolescent-to-parent family violence offense (<italic>n</italic> = 775).</p></sec><sec><title>Procedure</title><p>Discrete routinely collected episode data in police and health service electronic records for children, and police data for parents, were linked and transformed into longitudinal person-based records from birth to 19 years to identify trajectories for mental health problems.</p></sec><sec><title>Results</title><p>Sixty-three percent (<italic>n</italic> = 489) of adolescents had contact with a mental health service before age 19. The majority of these adolescents received a diagnosis for a stress or anxiety disorder (<italic>n</italic> = 200). Trajectory analysis found childhood exposure to parental intimate partner violence and parental drug and/or alcohol use were dominant events in the pathway to receiving a mental health diagnosis. Being a victim of a sexual offense was found to increase the odds of adolescents having a diagnosis for each of the main mental health categories (with the exception of drug or alcohol disorders).</p></sec><sec><title>Conclusions</title><p>Pathways to mental health problems were characterized by inter-related adverse childhood events and poly-victimization for many adolescents. Early identification of at-risk children must be a continued focus of child health services in order to reduce and identify early emerging mental health problems.</p></sec>