2745 – Socio-Demographic Characteristics of Adolescents with a First Psychotic Episode

Abstract

Introduction:

Time of profound change, adolescence is a critical period of development and transition between childhood and adulthood. Age life source of conflict, opposition and misunderstanding highlights some psychological fragility of life and the subject is likely to develop psychiatric disorders including psychosis.

Objectives:

Meeting the demographic characteristics of a population of adolescents who had been hospitalized for a first episode of psychosis.

Materials and methods:

Retrospective and descriptive performed on patient records adolescents whose ages are between 16 and 19 years hospitalized for a first episode of psychosis in psychiatric wards of Hospital Razi between January 2004 and June 2008. The socio-demographic data were collected using a pre-established form and analyzed using SPSS software version 11.

Results:

Our series consisted of 27 boys and 13 girls with a sex ratio was 2.07. The average age of our sample was 17.9 years. About 65% of their patients were students, 20% held irregular work and 15% were unemployed. For socio-economic conditions, they were poor in 60% of cases, moderate in 35% of cases and good in only 5%.

Conclusions:

Despite the study of socio-demographic characteristics of this population, the onset of first episode psychosis in adolescents has still practical difficulties in preventing the occurrence of this disorder remains uncertain outcome which the clinician cannot predict how scalable.