Presión y otros problemas emocionales-conductuales en población infanto-juvenil españolaUna exploración clínica desde el análisis de redes

Abstract

Abstract Current data on Spanish child and adolescent mental health show that despite the existence of problems of under detection, there is a high presence of mental disorders. These diverse mental pathologies, if not properly attended to during childhood and adolescence, persist and present themselves repeatedly in adulthood, favoring their severity and chronification; added to this, the interference in the adaptive functioning that mental and neurological disorders cause in adulthood is enormous. Therefore, the general objective of the present doctoral thesis was to explore the dynamics of depression and other frequent emotional-behavioral problems in Spanish child and adolescent population applying network analysis. The obtained results, structured in 4 studies, contribute: a psychometrically validated instrument for the exploration of depressive behaviors (study 1); symptomatological dynamics in which certain behaviors facilitating potential psychopathological problems in children and adolescents are identified (study 2); the central role of mixed anxiety-depression symptomatology in the appearance of diverse problems and the symptoms that connect in the comorbidity between depressive behaviors and other psychopathologies (study 3); and finally, the bridge symptoms of comorbidity and the symptomatological trajectories of anxiety and depression in the child and adolescent population (study 4). These findings acquire importance as a theoretical contribution for a deeper understanding of psychopathology in Spanish children and adolescents, becoming information that can be used for more relevant psychological assessments and interventions.