Exploring Mental Health and Childhood Experiences

Information was collected on participants’ gender identification, sexual orientation, perceived household wealth, and language spoken most at home. Participants were also asked to indicate whether they had ever been diagnosed with a range of mental illnesses (e.g., major depression, social anxiety disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, panic disorder) by a professional, and to complete the Adapted Behavioural Risk Factor Surveillance System Adverse Childhood Experience Module (BRFSS-ACE). The BRFSS-ACE (e.g., Have you ever felt like your life was in serious danger or that you would be harmed?; Have you ever been in out-of-home or foster care?) is a widely used 8-item scale to assess adverse childhood experiences and has acceptable psychometric properties [38 (link)]. For both mental illness history and adverse childhood experiences, we calculated a composite score from item responses, which was then dichotomised to identify participants who had no mental illness history/adverse experiences and those who had a mental illness history/adverse experiences.