Lebensqualität bei psychisch kranken und gesunden Kindern und Jugendlichen - Ergebnisse einer kontrollierten Vergleichsuntersuchung

The aim of the study was to determine if there are differences in the quality of life between children with psychiatric disorders and mental healthy ones. We collected 1008 parent ratings through a telephone interview developed out of the ILK (Mattejat et al., 1998). Quality of life of these mental healthy children was compared to those in a clinical study, where parents rated the quality of life of their mental disabled children (multicenter-study by Mattejat et al., 1998). To reduce biases by age, gender and school-type we built 353 matched-pairs. Our results indicate that mental disabled children and adolescents have significant more problems in all life domains, especially in global well-being, emotional life, school, family and social contact to children. We could also find differences between the results of internal and external mental disordered children compared with healthy children: in both groups we noticed a significant difference in all life domains, especially in global well-being and emotional life. In the internal group additional problems were noticed with social contact to other children, external disabled children have their main problems in school and family. Other academic studies verify our results. In the internal group additional problems were recognized within their family, in the external group the main problems were with the social contact to other children. Finding out if there are differences between diagnostic groups should be an aim of further investigation. Also the relevance of problems in school should be researched furthermore. The results we found show that quality of life research can be a useful tool to confirm the diagnosis or to evaluate a therapy and should be matter of routine for quality assurance.