This post was co-written by Eugene Rubin MD, PhD and Charles Zorumski MD.

Many mental disorders begin during childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. How common is mental illness in young persons? How disabling are these disorders? These questions are addressed in an important paper by Christian Kieling, Peter Szatmari, and colleagues in JAMA Psychiatry, based on data from the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Study. In order to study differences among age groups, they analyzed data for four groups: 5 to 9-year-olds, 10 to 14-year-olds, 15 to 19-year-olds, and 20 to 24-year-olds.

The Global Burden of Disease Study categorizes mental disorders into the following groups: anxiety disorders, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, bipolar disorder, conduct disorder, depressive disorders, eating disorders, schizophrenia, developmental intellectual disability, and other mental disorders. It classifies substance use disorders separately into alcohol use disorder and drug use disorders.

Data from the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Study indicate that about 11.6% of 2516 million children and youth aged 5 to 24 years have a mental disorder, and about 1.2% have substance use disorder. The prevalence of mental disorders ranged from 6.8% of those 5 to 9 years old to 13.6% of those 20 to 24 years old. Importantly, there were age-dependent patterns of prevalence for specific mental disorders. For........

© Psychology Today