Children’s mental health strategies and practices in Addis Ababa Ethiopia

In recent years, children’s well-being has become a hot research topic that has been increasingly gaining attention in the field of psychiatry, social work, psychology, and public health research. The present study was meant to explore the existing children’s mental health service strategies and practices in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The data have been carefully collected through open-ended interviews and focus group discussions, by capturing the participants’ experiences. This study counted with the participation of managers of child-serving organizations, mental health workers (psychologists, psychiatric nurses, social workers, and psychiatrists), orphans, and vulnerable children, including their guardians. The findings indicated limited access to specialized treatment, inadequate skilled human resources, lack of mental health education, and depicted that the local community preferred traditional medicine and religious healing practices in order to cure mental illnesses. Children’s mental health services are at a disadvantage and the most neglected health program, needing urgent involvement of the local government, non-governmental organizations, researchers, and policymakers, amongst several other stakeholders.     

Reliability and validity of the Arabic Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED) in a clinical sample

This study aimed at investigating the reliability and validity of the Arabic Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED) as a first child and adolescent anxiety screening tool in the Arab World. The English parent (SCARED-P) and child (SCARED-C) versions were translated into Arabic and administered along with the Arabic Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) to 77 parents and 67 children attending a Psychiatry clinic. DSM-IV-TR diagnoses were made by a psychiatrist without knowledge of the scale scores. Internal consistency was confirmed by Cronbach's α=0.92 for SCARED-P and 0.91 for SCARED-C. Their subscales had internal consistencies between 0.65 and 0.89. Parent–child agreement was r=0.67, p<0.001. SCARED-P demonstrated good discriminant validity between participants with anxiety disorders and those with other psychiatric disorders (t(72)=3.13, p=0.003). For SCARED-C, this difference was significant when participants with depressive disorders were excluded (t(43)=2.58, p=0.01). Convergent validity was evident through a significant correlation between SCARED-P and the parent SDQ emotional subscale (r=0.70, p<0.001), and SCARED-C and the child SDQ emotional subscale (r=0.70, p<0.001). Divergent validity with the SDQ hyperactivity subscale was observed as no significant correlation was found. Overall, the Arabic SCARED demonstrated satisfactory psychometric properties in a clinical sample in Lebanon.     

Academic self-concept in children with epilepsy and its relation to their quality of life

Abstract

Objectives:

Academic achievement in children with epilepsy is a highly studied topic with many important implications. However, only little attention has been devoted to academic self-concept of such children and the relation of academic self-concept to their quality of life. We aimed to examine academic self-concept in children with epilepsy, to assess its relationship to academic achievement and to determine possible correlations between academic self-concept and quality of life.

Methods:

The study group consisted of 182 children and adolescents aged 9–14 years who completed the student’s perception of ability scale (SPAS) questionnaire to determine their academic self-concept and the modified Czech version of the CHEQOL-25 questionnaire to determine their health-related quality of life.

Results:

We found that academic self-concept in children with epilepsy was on average significantly lower than in their peers without seizures, especially with regard to general school-related abilities, reading, and spelling. On the other hand, the variance in the data obtained from the group of children with epilepsy was significantly higher than in the whole population and the proportion of individuals with very high academic self-concept seems comparable among children with and without epilepsy. Moreover, it was found that correlations between academic self-concept and academic achievement are significantly lower in children with epilepsy than in the whole population.

Discussion:

The presented results suggest that considerable attention should be paid to the role of academic self-concept in education of children with epilepsy and to the factors influencing this self-concept in this group.     

Évaluation gnoso-praxique linguale des enfants de 4 ans et demi à 9 ans et demi

The study of lingual gnosis and praxis skills of children aged from 4.5 years old to 9.5 years old has been realized on normal children and on children under speech therapy for speech and language disorder. The comparison of normal children between our research and the one of Tardieu shows that today's children aged between 6.5 and 9.5 years have lower gnostic skills than in 1973. We observe a lingual gnostic deficit for children of all ages receiving speech therapy, the gap tending to fade as they get older. It seems appropriate to integrate a speech-language assessment test to better understand the gnostic deficit of children with a verbal orality and/or eating disorder. Such information would help to define the therapeutic approach of the speech therapy and thus promote the education gnoso-oral praxis early.     

A comparative study of the phonology of pre-school children with specific language impairment (SLI), language delay (LD) and normal acquisition

The phonology of two groups of SLI (n =5) and LD (n =5) children was analysed at age 3 and compared with two control groups: an age control (n =5) and a language level control (measured using the MLU-W) (n =5). Children with SLI and LD showed a delay in the acquisition of segments, syllabic structures and word structures, and in the simplification processes, compared with their age control group. However, SLI children also displayed significant differences vis-à-vis their language level controls, mainly in early acquisitions: vowels, nasals and stops at the segmental level, and in CV structures at the syllabic level. There is also a simplification process that seems to be more prevalent in these children than in their language level controls, namely, the deletion of unstressed syllables, mainly initial ones. The results enable SLI to be distinguished from LD and suggest that the development of SLI phonology is deviant. This deviation is interpreted as being a plateau in early acquisitions when later acquisitions have already appeared. The results are considered in the light of Leonard's surface hypothesis and an exclusively linguistic cause for this disorder is ruled out.