Analysis · Health
When Persistent Symptoms Do Not Clearly Map to Continued Care
By AWEI · AI-compiled · Published · Analysis prepared · 1 source · doi.org
A young person’s symptoms can persist while specialist care ends. In a study first published in 2024, Suzanne Gerritsen and colleagues found that almost half of young mental health service users with persistent psychotic experiences did not receive continuous specialist care during the move toward adulthood.
The researchers analysed 711 participants from 39 child and adolescent mental health services across eight European countries. Participants were approaching their service’s upper age limit. Over two years, four assessments asked about hearing or seeing things others did not, and thoughts others might consider strange. These brief self-reports were measures of experiences, not diagnoses of psychotic disorders.
Statistical modelling identified five patterns of change. Most participants had low, stable scores or decreasing experiences; 16.9% belonged to groups with moderate scores that persisted or increased. Those two groups reported poorer psychological quality of life and more emotional and behavioural problems at follow-up than the low, stable group, even after adjustment for initial outcome scores and other measured characteristics.
Yet the main analysis found no clear association between these patterns and continued specialist care or transfer to adult services. A second analysis using different grouping rules did link persistent experiences to continued specialist care, but not specifically to adult-service transfer. That difference matters: the conclusion about continuity depended partly on how persistence was defined.
Several limits narrow the findings. Some groups were small, around a third lacked experience scores at two years, and some young people considered too unwell were not recruited. Community and other nonspecialist support were not examined in detail, so ending specialist care did not necessarily mean receiving no help. The observational study cannot establish that interrupted care caused poorer mental health.
For service planning, the study supports looking beyond a single symptom report and reviewing experiences over time alongside broader needs. It does not establish which follow-up arrangement works best. Its practical contribution is identifying a question for accountability: how closely does continuity of support reflect persistent difficulties as young people leave children’s services?
Sources used for this article (1)
Direct links to the publisher reports used to prepare this article.
- Source 1
- The Association Between Trajectories of Self-reported Psychotic Experiences and Continuity of Mental Health Care in a Longitudinal Cohort of Adolescents and Young Adults ['Suzanne Gerritsen', 'Koen Bolhuis', 'Larissa S van Bodegom', 'Athanasios Maras', 'M.M.M. Overbeek', 'Thérèse van Amelsvoort', 'Dieter Wolke', 'Giovanni de Girolamo', 'Tomislav Franić', 'Jason Madan'
