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Self-Reported Personal Well-Being of Youth Accessing Intensive Mental Health Treatment

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Abstract

Normative samples have been shown to rate their personal wellbeing (PWB) as positively high and high PWB is associated with many enduring benefits. Cummins (J Happiness Stud 10(6):1–17, 2009) has suggested that PWB has an equilibrium that is set at a rather high positive state and maintained through psychological mechanisms he termed homeostatic protected mood (HPM). Investigators who have explored PWB and mental health disorders have often focused on schizophrenia in adult populations, with varied results, and scant attention has been paid to clinical samples of youth with emotional and/or behavioral disorders. The purpose for this report was to explore the level of PWB reported by a subsample of youth who accessed residential treatment (n = 30) and intensive home based treatment (n = 33) at 12–18 months post-discharge, and explore whether clinical variables could predict PWB. Many youth reported high PWB despite experiencing continued challenges in symptoms and psychosocial functioning. Demographic and clinical characteristics did not predict participants’ PWB scores, lending support for the HPM theory with this sample of youth with emotional and behavioral disorder.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Social and Applied Human Sciences, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, N1G 2W1, Canada

    Andrea Patterson, Michèle Preyde & Scott B. Maitland

  2. Lutherwood, Waterloo, Canada

    Randy Penney

  3. Craigwood Youth Services, London, Canada

    Graham Ashbourne

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  1. Andrea Patterson
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  2. Michèle Preyde
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  3. Scott B. Maitland
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  4. Randy Penney
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  5. Graham Ashbourne
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Correspondence to Michèle Preyde.

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Patterson, A., Preyde, M., Maitland, S.B. et al. Self-Reported Personal Well-Being of Youth Accessing Intensive Mental Health Treatment. Child Adolesc Soc Work J 33, 535–545 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10560-016-0448-2

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