Page 30 - Age of onset of disruptive behavior of residentially treated adolescents -Sjoukje de Boer

Netherlands, Youth Health Care (YHC) offers basic care to all children from birth until the age of nineteen. This system already exists for over a hundred years and is unique in the world. The care is offered free of charge and 95% of all children is reached. YHC is aimed at the growth and development of the child and monitors the physical, mental, social and cognitive development of children. Traditionally, the emphasis was on the physical development of the child, but in recent years, educational and psychosocial problems were also taken into account (AJN, 2009). From age five on, the schoolteacher of the second grade is asked which children need extra attention. If a child is in need of extra attention, the remarks of the teacher are recorded in the YHC files.
Aim of the study
The question addressed in this paper was whether the distinction between subjects who received residential treatment for disruptive behavior during adolescence and a non-treatment control group could be made on the basis of information in the YHC files gathered at an early age. Remarks indicating disruptive behaviors at the age of five of the patients and a control group were compared to determine whether the patients already displayed more disruptive behavior in early childhood. It was hypothesized that at the age of five more signs of disruptive behavior would have been reported by the YHC workers as well as the teachers in the YHC files of the inpatients compared to the non-treatment group.
Currently some research has been conducted to determine whether the epidemiological findings regarding LCP antisocial behavior apply within a clinical sample (De Boer, Boon, Verheij, & Donker, 2013; De Boer et al., 2012; De Boer, Verheij, & Donker, 2007). The question arose whether the distinction between individuals on the LCP and AL trajectories of antisocial behavior could be made in an inpatient sample of adolescents treated in a orthopsychiatric facility, based on retrospective data of youth health care files. This is relevant because in orthopsychiatric settings adolescents are treated who are contraindicated for regular psychiatric treatment because of their severe disruptive behavior. During adolescence these inpatients meet the broad criteria that are used in epidemiological studies on antisocial behavior. Therefore, if this behavior started early in life, they meet the criteria of the LCP group. It has been
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