Clinical, familial, and socio-cultural profile of children with mental health disorders in the Kurdistan region: a large retrospective cross-sectional study

Purpose:
Numerous mental health disorders in childhood and adolescence typically begin during the early-to-middle years of childhood. Due to insufficient evidence in the Middle East, we reported the mental health profile of childhood and adolescence in the Kurdistan Region.

Methods
In this retrospective cross-sectional study, we included 852 cases of children and adolescents from the Child and Adolescent Men-tal Health Center in Duhok City in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, for ten years between 2015 and 2024.

Results
The mean value of age of the patients, aged 2-22 years, was 10.97 (SD: 4.31 years). The study found that 23.19% of the children had failed at school. The majority of the patients were from nuclear families (99.76%) and had 6-10 family members, followed by those who had 3-5 (40.33%). The study showed that 19.10% of the children have a family history of psychiatric disorders. The most common types of mental disorders among children were those of psychological development (69.25%) and neurotic, stress-related, and somatoform disorders (11.27%). The delivery types of the patients were normal vaginal delivery (74.19%), followed by cesarean section (22.58%) and difficult labor (3.23%). Preschool children were more likely to have normal medical conditions (20.51%) than other age groups (p = 0.0334). The patients with a family history were more likely to have mental dis-orders (95.68% vs. 90.43%; p = 0.0319) and neurodevelopmental disorders (94.62% vs. 87.57%; p = 0.0216).

Conclusions
The most common types of psychiatric disorders in children were neurodevelopmental disorders and neurotic, stress-related, and somatoform disorders, and were linked to a family history of mental disorders.