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. 2023 Apr 11:2:1074861.
doi: 10.3389/frcha.2023.1074861. eCollection 2023.

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

Allison Peck  1 , Marie Hutchinson  1 , Steve Provost  1
Affiliations

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

Allison Peck et al. Front Child Adolesc Psychiatry. .

Abstract

Aim: 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.

Design: A retrospective case-series design employing data linkage.

Setting: An Australian regional location.

Participants: Adolescents (born between 1994 and 2006) issued a legal action by the NSW Police Force for an adolescent-to-parent family violence offense (n = 775).

Procedure: 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.

Results: Sixty-three percent (n = 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 (n = 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).

Conclusions: 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.

Keywords: adolescent-to-parent violence; anxiety disorders; child and adolescent psychiatry; depression and mood disorders; process mining; statistics and research methods.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals for each event variable by mental health category. (A) Stress or anxiety disorder (B) Attempt suicide or self-harm (C) Drug or alcohol related mental health disorder (D) Mood disorder (E) Neurodevelopmental disorder (F) Impulse disorder.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Process model from birth to age 19.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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