Avinash De Sousa.
Psychopathology and anxiety perception amongst parents of children with school refusal.
J Pak Psych Soc Jan ;6(1):36-41.

The present study looks at psychopathology in parents of children with school refusal examining mothers and fathers separately. It also highlights the differences between parents in perceiving the anxiety of their children. The clinical setting for the study was one in keeping with routine clinical practice in India. SUBJECTS AND METHODS The subjects for the study were children with school refusal and their parents that presented to a private psychiatric clinic in Mumbai, India. All children belonged to the age group 8-12 years and were studying in a non boarding full day school. All the children in the study experienced considerable emotional distress in attending school due to various forms of anxiety on clinical assessment. All children had missed at least 10 days of school in the last month prior to presentation. This was the clinical criteria to select children with school refusal as it is not a DSMIV / ICD diagnosis as yet. RESULTS No major differences were noted in the socio-demographic data of both parents. Mean ages of the fathers was 43.6 years and mothers was 39.4 years. Majority of both parents were graduates and above (> 80%). 92% of the fathers were employed while 42% of mothers were housewives in keeping with Indian cultural standards. Mean age of the children was 9.4 years. On assessing the scores on the SCL-90 scale (table 1), it was found that mothers showed significantly greater scores on phobic anxiety (p = 0.0380), somatization (p = 0.0134) and depression (p = 0.0059). Both parents had higher scores towards psychopathology on the anxiety, obsessive compulsive and general symptomatic index scales. A high degree of interpersonal sensitivity and obsessiveness was noted in both groups depicting a lot about personality patterns of the parents. On assessing the proportion of the scores on SCL- 90 (table 2), greater number of mothers gave abnormal scores on the somatization (p = 0.0001), depression (p = 0.008) and phobic anxiety (0.0135) subscales. (Short Communication).

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