PSYCHOEMOTIONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF INTERNALLY DISPLACED ADOLESCENTS
Abstract
War stress and anxiety leads to severe depression and psychosomatic disorders in the most vulnerable category of the population – adolescents. It justifies the need for early identification of the problem, effective recovery and maintenance of their mental health.
The purpose of the study is to find out the psycho-emotional characteristics of adolescent internally displaced persons (IDPs), taking into account gender.
Materials and Methods: A screening psychodiagnostics of 282 adolescents in the age of 15 to 17 years old was conducted using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), that is validated in Ukraine. The main group consisted of 168 IDP adolescents, the control group consisted of 114 schoolchildren from the city of Ivano-Frankivsk.
Results: subclinical and clinical expressed anxiety and depression were found in 69.6% and 39.3% of the IDP adolescents and 63.2% and 44.7% of the schoolchildren in the Prykarpattia region, respectively. By gender, clinically expressed anxiety and depression were significantly more common in the adolescent girls of groups I and II (71.4% and 42.1% and 17.8% and 42.1%, respectively). It was found that the adolescent boys were more stress-resistant with predominantly subclinical manifestations of anxiety and depression. While adolescent girls were more emotional and significantly more often had manifestations of clinically pronounced anxiety and depression, which gave a reason to consider female gender as an important risk factor for the development of psycho-emotional disorders in the future.
Conclusions: Assessment of the psycho-emotional state of the adolescents who were forced to become IDPs and those who permanently resided in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk (Prykarpattia) during the full-scale war in Ukraine revealed unidirectional trend – 2/3 of the examined persons in both groups had manifestations of subclinical and clinically pronounced anxiety and about 40% had depression: subclinical depression was 1.9 times more often in group I, and clinically significant depression was 2.2 times more often in group II, mainly in girls.
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