Young People With and Without Intellectual Disability Accessing Mental Health Services: Evaluating Psychosocial Functioning Outcomes Using Electronic Health Records.

The study did not record what treatment each young person received, and some young people were seen for neurodevelopmental diagnostic assessment only, so improvement cannot be attributed to a specific intervention. The data came from one mental health trust in London, and the cohort was more socioeconomically deprived than the average boroughs in England. The CGAS is a global measure and was not designed to capture variation in intellectual disability, so a score can reflect cognitive impairment, mental health, emotional and other psychosocial factors together. Severe and profound ID were combined for some comorbidity analyses because the separate groups were too small, and only the three most prevalent comorbidities were modelled. Missing data were imputed, while clinical significance analyses used the original sample, so the two sets of results are not based on exactly the same handling of missingness. Episodes were analysed separately, so a young person with multiple episodes could be counted more than once. Most diagnoses of ID were entered after 01 January 2007, which may limit earlier record completeness.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest. The study was funded by the NIHR Health and Social Care Delivery Research Programme, What Works for Early Intervention and Children's Social Care, and the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration East of England at Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust.

Do not read the improvements after CAMHS episodes as proof that a particular therapy worked. The dataset did not record what treatment each young person received, some young people were seen for diagnostic assessment only, and young people with ID still had lower discharge functioning than matched peers.