Commentary: Seeing the forest of knowledge for the trees of associations - a commentary on Costello and Maughan (2015)

Costello and Maughan have written an excellent and highly informative review on outcomes of child and adolescent emotional, attention-deficit/hyperactivity, disruptive and substance use disorders, which is very much worth a read. The review confirms the notion that child and adolescent mental illnesses have a highly heterogeneous course. The majority of the children and adolescents with mental illnesses will keep having (residual) problems later in their lives but this developmental trajectory is by no means deterministic; adult mental health and functioning within the normal range is prevalent as well, particularly among adolescent substance abusers. This is hopeful since it suggests that there is room for improvement, and calls for identification of good early-life predictors of long-term outcomes to make optimally informed decisions about who will probably end up in a favorable trajectory spontaneously and who will need treatment to achieve that. The current state of knowledge with regard to these long-tern predictions still shows many gaps, and Costello and Maughan hence conclude that there is a need for further research on optimal outcomes both within specific diagnostic groups and across child psychopathology as a whole' There is a need for further knowledge on this issue indeed, but how should we proceed to gain that knowledge? Are there lessons to be learnt from the past?

Read the full article at doi: