Childhood Antecedents to Youth Mental Disorders: A Birth Cohort Study Using Population-Based Health Administrative Data

Mental disorders among youth are responsible for a substantial proportion of the morbidity of psychiatric illness. It occurs during a critical time in the life course, which has a significant impact on the development and social trajectories of young people. Understanding the role of social determinants and early life adversity on the subsequent risk of mental disorders among Canadian youth is crucial for informing primary and secondary prevention efforts and identifying high risk populations.

This program of research will develop a population-based birth cohort that will enable our research group to examine how social factors and early life adversity have an impact on a person’s risk of developing a mental disorder during adolescence and early adulthood, with an initial focus on psychotic disorders. This will allow us to obtain population-based information on the distribution and determinants of psychotic disorders in Ontario, and obtain evidence on understudied priority groups, such as women, migrant populations, homeless, and people in the corrections system, as well as Indigenous people. We will explore the geographic distribution of psychotic disorders across the province, and study the impact of socioeconomic disadvantage and marginalization on the risk of developing a psychotic disorder. We will also characterize trajectories of psychiatric diagnoses prior to a first diagnosis of psychotic disorder to identify key intervention points for prevention strategies.

Project participants

Funding: Petro Canada Young Innovator Award, Children’s Health Research Institute

Principal Investigator: Kelly Anderson

Co-Investigators: Jordan Edwards, Rebecca Rodrigues, Jinette Comeau, Piotr Wilk, Martin Rotenberg

Students: Ramez Salama