In late adolescence, 22% of the TRAILS participants had experienced an episode of severe DSM-IV mental disorder, and an additional 23% had experienced mild disorders. The burden of mental illness concentrated in the 10% of the cohort who had three or more disorders.3 The substantial proportion of adolescents with (serious) mental health problems raises the question whether these problems are treated adequately. The use of youth mental health care services has risen substantially during the past decades, in The Netherlands4 as well as in other countries.5,6Although this rise suggests a lowered threshold for help-seeking in adolescents, only a quarter to half of those diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder actually receive help.7 We recently linked care utilization data from a psychiatric case registry to the TRAILS database. Compared with self-reported care utilization, registry-based data have the benefit of not being affected by recall bias. The longitudinal population-based nature of TRAILS combined with detailed information about their patterns of care use will help to better understand pathways leading to or away from mental health care utilization, as well as the implications of mental health care use for future mental health.
