Mental health problems among adolescents and young adults with childhood-onset physical disabilities: A scoping review.

This is a scoping review, not a test of whether any treatment works. The authors did not assess study quality, so the included studies may have had serious weaknesses. The 33 studies used very different designs, populations, disability types, mental health definitions, measures, informants and cutoff points, making rates hard to compare. Search was limited to English and French articles from 2007 to 2019, so older or non-English evidence was missed. Most included studies were cross-sectional, so they cannot show what causes mental health problems or whether services help. Prevalence means and medians were not weighted by sample size and may be skewed by small or large studies. Only 10 studies addressed access and use of mental health services, and details of treatment received were limited. Some studies had mixed samples or did not report enough detail about disability severity or functional limitations.

Do not read the reported ranges as a single reliable estimate for all young people with physical disabilities. The review did not assess study quality, and the studies used different measures, informants and cutoffs, so the wide ranges may reflect measurement differences rather than true differences in mental health.