Posted
July, 2011
Assessment
of Parent and Child Psychopathology in Child Mental Health
Services
Services
for children may benefit from assessing the children's parents
in order to identify parental problems relevant to helping
the children. This is because parents and children may have
similar problems, parents' problems may affect children's
functioning or complicate treatment of the children, children's
problems may affect parental functioning, and parents may
need treatment in order to help their children. Vidair et
al. (2011) studied relations between assessment of parents'
self-reported depression, anxiety, and somatization with the
Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) and the functioning of 848 6-17-year-olds
referred to an outpatient psychiatric service in New York
City. The children were assessed with the CBCL/6-18, diagnostic
interviews with the children and their parents, and the Children's
Global Assessment Scale (CGAS), a 100-point scale on which
clinicians rate children's functioning. High problem scores
on BSIs completed by mothers were significantly associated
with children's CGAS scores and CBCL scores indicative of
poor functioning, as well as with children's diagnoses of
depression, anxiety, and oppositional and conduct disorders,
but not with diagnoses of ADHD. High problem scores on BSIs
completed by fathers showed similar but not statistically
significant associations with their children's problems. As
Vidair et al. acknowledged, the BSI's failure to assess parental
attention and other problems may have prevented the study
from detecting associations with ADHD and other disorders
in the children. However, the authors concluded that "There
is a great need to develop mental health systems that will
be able to provide assessments and deliver evidence-based
treatments to children, mothers, and fathers within the same
clinical setting" (p. 449).
Reference:
Reference: Vidair, H.B., Reyes, J.A., Shen, S., Parrilla-Escobar,
M.A., Heleniak, C.M., et al. (2011). Screening parents during
child evaluations: Exploring parent and child psychopathology
in the same clinic. Journal of the American Academy of
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 50, 441-450.
