Mental Health and School Functioning for Girls in the Child Welfare System : the Mediating Role of Future Orientation and School Engagement

This study investigated the association between mental health problems and academic and behavioral school functioning for adolescent girls in the child welfare system and determined whether school engagement and future orientation meditated the relationship. Participants were 231 girls aged between 12 and 19 who had been involved with the child welfare system. Results indicated that 39% of girls reported depressive symptoms in the clinical range and 54% reported posttraumatic symptoms in the clinical range. The most common school functioning problems reported were failing a class (41%) and physical fights with other students (35%). Participants reported a mean number of 1.7 school functioning problems. Higher levels of depression and PTSD were significantly associated with more school functioning problems. School engagement fully mediated the relationship between depression and school functioning and between PTSD and school functioning, both models controlling for age, race, and placement stability. Future orientation was not significantly associated with school functioning problems at the bivariate level. Findings suggest that school engagement is a potentially modifiable target for interventions aiming to ameliorate the negative influence of mental health problems on school functioning for adolescent girls with histories of abuse or neglect

Research on Social Media User Suicide Influencing Factors, Active Recognition and Intervention

With the development of Internet, more and more people express their own feeling on the social media, including suicide declaration, which create new opportunity for the identifying, preventing and intervening of suicide high risk group. The influencing factors of suicide behavior are numerous, mainly including internal and external factors. Internal factors include biological factors, mental disorders and psychological factors; external factors include negative life events, family factors, social environment factors and cultural factors. Systematic intervention of Internet is used to establish an automatic identification and assessment of suicide ideation in social media, and a mental psychotherapy with many other psychotherapies. Through timely intervention and referral, systematic intervention and continuous care intervention process, social media users can eliminate suicide idea and reduce suicide probability. At present, researchers pay more attention to the development process and mechanism of suicidal behavior. In the future, it will be necessary to establish Internet suicide intervention system and study the effect of different psychological intervention on Internet suicide. &copy; 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.</p

Frequency of child maltreatment in a representative sample of the German population

Iffland B, Brähler E, Neuner F, Häuser W, Glaesmer H. Frequency of child maltreatment in a representative sample of the German population. BMC Public Health. 2013;13(1): 980.Background Representative data about the frequency of child maltreatment is needed in order to estimate the extent of the problem in the wider population as well as to provide the basis for interpretation of frequency rates in clinical samples. However, previous representative studies on the frequency of child maltreatment in Germany and other countries were limited as they focused on the assessment of physical and sexual abuse whilst emotional forms of maltreatment were ignored. In addition, previous studies applied scales that had not been validated against external criteria. Methods In a cross-sectional study, standardized questionnaires were administered to a representative sample of the German population. Maltreatment in childhood and adolescence was assessed using the German version of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. Empirically derived threshold values for the five different types of child maltreatment including emotional maltreatment were applied to determine presence of abuse and neglect. Results Complete data was available from N = 2,500 subjects. Prevalence rates were 13.9% for emotional neglect, 10.2% for emotional abuse, 12.0% for physical abuse, 48.4% for physical neglect, and 6.2% for sexual abuse. Differences between sexes were found for the frequency of sexual abuse. Conclusions Although our analysis has found lower rates of child maltreatment than previous reports that used less well validated criteria, the results of this study confirm that child abuse, with its many different facets, is a significant problem in Germany