Psychiatric Disorder, Impairment, and Service Use in Rural African American and White Youth

Background:The Caring for Children in the Community Study examined the prevalence of DSM-IV psychiatric disorders and correlates of mental health service use in rural African American and white youth.Methods: Four thousand five hundred youth aged 9 to 17 years from 4 North Carolina counties were randomly selected from school databases.Parents completed telephone questionnaires about their children's behavior problems.A second-stage sample of 1302 was identified for recruitment into the interview phase of the study, and 920 (70.7%) of these were successfully interviewed at home using the Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Assessment and related measures of service use.Results: Weighted back to general population estimates, 21.1% of youth had 1 or more DSM-IV psychiatric disorders in the past 3 months.Prevalence was similar in African American (20.5%) and white (21.9%) youth.