Amsterdam Public Health

Several, specific mental disorders have their peak or initial onset during adolescence including social anxiety disorder, eating disorders, and major depression. While research into risk factors often focuses on very early risk such as parenting or temperament or on non-developmentally specific risk such as stressful life events, there has been little evaluation of factors responsible for onset of these disorders during this specific developmental window.
We recently published a theoretical model of the development of mental disorders that we refer to as the “social-emotional” disorders, during the early to mid adolescent period. Alongside this model we have been collecting annual data on a sample of 500 young people beginning from around 11 years of age to currently, 16 years. In this talk I will present our theoretical model of adolescent developmental influence on social-emotional disorders and will summarise a sampling of some of our emerging empirical results from this cohort study.