Lifetime and past-year prevalence of children's exposure to violence in 9 Balkan countries: the BECAN study.

Background: Children's exposure to violence is a major public health issue. The Balkan epidemiological study on Child Abuse and Neglect project aimed to collect internationally comparable data on violence exposures in childhood.

Methods: A three stage stratified random sample of 42,194 school-attending children (response rate: 66.

Psychopathology and resilience in relation to abuse in childhood among youth first referred to the psychiatrist.

Background/aim: Child abuse may be related to adverse psychological outcomes in adult life. However, little is known about specific clinical, family and resilience profiles of adolescents that have experienced child abuse. The aim of this study was to investigate clinical symptoms, family functioning and resilience characteristics of adolescents with the experience of abuse, first referred to psychiatrists.

Management in child and adolescent psychiatry: how does it look in the Balkans?

This paper examines the situation of child and adolescent psychiatry in the following Balkan countries: Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, FYROM, and Montenegro. With the exception of Greece, these countries are new democracies, with their mental health services in a transitional stage of organization. Overall, they have initiated programmes to move psychiatric care towards deinstitutionalization, developing outpatient infrastructures to handle psychiatric disorders.

Promotion of children's early psychosocial development through primary health care services.

The paper presents the study design of the development and organisation of an EU/WHO multicentre study on the promotion of children's early psychosocial development through primary health care services. The aim of the programme is to develop training for primary health care workers (PHCWs) that improves their ability to assess factors relevant to psychosocial development and gives them preventive approaches to foster that development, building on families' strengths. The focus is on the period from conception to the end of the second year of the child's' life.