Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ReviewSystematic Review and Meta-analysis: The Prevalence of Mental Illness in Child and Adolescent Refugees and Asylum Seekers
Section snippets
Search Strategy and Selection Criteria
The protocol for this systematic review and meta-analysis was registered with PROSPERO CRD42016046349 (https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?RecordID=46349). We followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA).22 A PRISMA checklist is provided in Table S1 (available online). The protocol was based on that used in the earlier systematic review by Fazel et al.21 (which included adult, child, and adolescent refugee populations) but expanded
Results
The entire search, including electronic databases and other sources, yielded a total of 17,423 documents. A flowchart outlining the search results and selection of studies is provided in Figure 1. After removing duplicates, 10,419 documents were excluded based on title and abstract, and a further 965 documents were screened by full-text retrieval. Eight studies pertaining to child and adolescent populations met the inclusion criteria,29, 30, 31, 32,41, 42, 43, 44 after a final exclusion of
Discussion
This systematic review aimed to overcome some of the methodological limitations of the current body of evidence, and to establish new estimates of mental illness in child and adolescent refugee populations. The review identified a limited number of high-quality studies measuring prevalence estimates of mental illness, despite the substantial number of children and adolescents displaced globally. Overall, the findings have shown that refugee and asylum seeker children have high rates of PTSD
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Cited by (0)
The authors have reported no funding for this work.
Mr. Ranasinha served as the statistical expert for this research.
Disclosure: Drs. Boyle and Gibson-Helm are National Health and Medical Research Council Fellows. Ms. Blackmore has received funding by scholarships from Australian Rotary Health (Ian Scott, PhD Scholarship), the Windermere Foundation, and the Monash Centre for Health Research and Implementation. Drs. Gray, Fazel, Fitzgerald, and Misso and Mr. Ranasinha have reported no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.