M. Donald et al., Prevalence of adverse life events, depression and suicidal thoughts and behaviour among a community sample of young people aged 15-24 years, AUS NZ J PU, 25(5), 2001, pp. 426-432
Citations number
21
Categorie Soggetti
Public Health & Health Care Science
Journal title
AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF PUBLIC HEALTH
Objective: To provide prevalence data on several key mental health indicato
rs for young people aged 15 to 24 years.
Methods: A cross-sectional household survey, using telephone recruitment fo
llowed by a postal pencil-and-paper questionnaire. The overall response rat
e was 67.3%.
Results: Difficulties with interpersonal relationships are common causes of
distress for young people, in particular problems with parents, problems w
ith friends and relationship break-ups. Depressive symptomatology is common
among young people with approximately one in eight males and one in four f
emales reporting current depressive symptomatology. One in three young peop
le reported that they had had suicidal thoughts at some time in the past, 1
.2% of young people reported that they had made a plan on how to kill thems
elves in the four-week period prior to completing the survey and 6.9% of yo
ung people reported that they had tried to kill themselves at some time dur
ing their life time (4.2% of males and 9.0% of females).
Conclusions and implications: The prevalence figures for the various mental
health indicators presented in this paper represent good baseline informat
ion upon which to examine the progress over time of interventions designed
to improve the mental health of young people.