Predictors of child and adolescent mental health treatment outcome

To examine the predictors of treatment outcome or improvement in mental health difficulties for young people accessing child and adolescent mental health services.

We conducted a secondary analysis of routinely collected data from services in England using the Mental Health Services Data Set. We conducted multilevel regressions on N = 5907 episodes from 14 services (M_age = 13.76 years, SD_age = 2.45, range = 8-25 years; 3540 or 59.93% female) with complete information on mental health difficulties at baseline. We conduct similar analyses on N = 1805 episodes from 10 services (M_age = 13.59 years, SD_age = 2.33, range = 8-24 years; 1120 or 62.05% female) also with complete information on mental health difficulties at follow up.

Girls had higher levels of mental health difficulties at baseline than boys (β = 0.28, 95% CI = 0.24-0.32). Young people with higher levels of mental health difficulties at baseline also had higher levels of deterioration in mental health difficulties at follow up (β = 0.72, 95% CI = 0.67-0.76), and girls had higher levels of deterioration in mental health difficulties at follow up than boys (β = 0.09, 95% CI = 0.03-0.16). Young people with social anxiety, panic disorder, low mood, or self-harm had higher levels of mental health difficulties at baseline and of deterioration in mental health difficulties at follow up compared to young people without these presenting problems.

Services seeing higher proportions of young people with higher levels of mental health difficulties at baseline, social anxiety, panic disorder, low mood, or self-harm may be expected to show lower levels of improvement in mental health difficulties at follow up.