Provided by David Satcher, M.D., Ph.D.
Surgeon General of the United States of America
Chapter 3: Children and Mental Health
Overview of Risk Factors and Prevention
Correlations and Interactions Among Risk Factors
Recent evidence suggests that social/environmental risk
factors may combine with physical risk factors of the child, such as
neurological damage caused by birth complications or low birthweight,
fearlessness and stimulation-seeking behavior, learning impairments, autonomic
underarousal, and insensitivity to physical pain and punishment (Raine et al.,
1996, 1997, 1998). However, testing models of the impact of risk factor
interactions for the development of mental disorders is difficult, because some
of the risk factors are difficult to measure. Thus, the trend these days is to
move away from the consideration of individual risk factors toward identifying
measurable risk factors and their combinations and incorporating all of them
into a single model that can be tested (Patterson, 1996).
The next section describes a series of preventive interventions directed against
the environmental risk factors described above.
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