Mental health status of adolescents with adverse childhood experience and the influencing factors / 中南大学学报(医学版)

Adverse childhood experience (ACE) is potentially negative experience that occurs between 0 and 18 years old. The ACE adolescents have prominent mental health problems such as emotional regulation disorder, unstable interpersonal relationship, poor coping ability, and cognitive dysfunction. Until now, the factors affecting the mental health of ACE adolescents are not clear, but it is certain that the ecosystem in which ACE adolescents life affects their mental health. Specifically, the parent-child relationship, the school environment, the peer relationship in the micro-system, and the interaction between the parent-child relationship and other interpersonal relationship in the meso-system have been confirmed to be significantly related to the mental health of ACE adolescents. In the appearance system, the neighborhood cohesion, the level of family income, the educational level of parents and the different social and cultural background in the macro-system all have different degrees of impact on the development of ACE adolescents' psychological behaviors. In the diachronic system, the time and frequency of suffering from ACE have different effects on the mental health regarding the ACE adolescents.

Cumulative risk effect of household dysfunction for child maltreatment after intensive intervention of the child protection system in Japan: a longitudinal analysis

BACKGROUND@#Building an effective casework system for child maltreatment is a global issue. We estimated the effect of household dysfunction (i.e., interparental violence, caregiver mental health problems, and caregiver substance abuse) on child maltreatment to understand how to advance the current framework of child welfare.@*METHODS@#The sample comprised 759 children (1- to 17-year-old; mean age was 10.6; 404 boys and 355 girls) placed in temporary custody units (one of the strongest intervention of the Japanese child protection system). Caseworkers from 180 units across 43 prefectures completed questionnaires on children and their family and were asked whether a child maltreatment report had been made after cancelation of custody in a 15-month follow-up period. The relations of household dysfunction and maltreatment reports were assessed using the Cox proportional hazard model.@*RESULTS@#About half (48.4%) of the children had been placed in the unit because of maltreatment, and 88.3% had a history of victimization. Seventy-six cases had maltreatment reports after cancelation. We entered household dysfunction variables individually into the model, and each had a significant relationship with maltreatment reports (hazard ratios for interparental violence, caregiver mental health problem, and substance abuse were 1.69, 1.69, and 2.19, respectively) after covariate adjustment. When treating these three variables as cumulative risk score model of household dysfunction, the hazard ratio increased with increasing number of score (1.96 for score two; 2.35 for score three; score 0 as reference).@*CONCLUSIONS@#Greater household dysfunction score is a risk of maltreatment after intensive intervention. It is imperative to construct systems facilitating cooperation between child and adult service sectors and to deliver seamless services to children and families. Our findings provide child protect services with risk-stratified interventions for children at victimization risk and promote adult-focused services to be proactive in prevention or intervention for adults with perpetration risk.