Discovery of previously undetected intellectual disability by psychological assessment: a study of consecutively referred child and adolescent psychiatric inpatients.

Intellectual disability is associated with an increased risk of behavioral disturbances and also complicates their treatment. Despite increases in the sophistication of medical detection of early risk for intellectual disability, there is remarkably little data about the detection of intellectual disability in cases referred for psychiatric treatment. In this study, we used a 10-year sample of 23,629 consecutive child and adolescent admissions (ages between 6 and 17) to inpatient psychiatric treatment.