Adolescent mental health disorders were allocated the largest part of this sum (e.g., 37% for 15–19-year-olds Poos et al.
For the Netherlands, a cost-of-illness (COI) study showed that a yearly 697 million euros was spend on mental health disorders in 0–19-year-olds, and costs increased with age. Mental health care costs for children and adolescents in the USA are up to around nine billion dollars a year (NIMH statistics 2006). Lifetime prevalence for this age group is estimated to be 9% for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), 14% for mood disorders, and 25% for anxiety disorders (Merikangas et al. According to the NIMH, the lifetime prevalence of a mental health disorder for 13–18-year-olds is 46.3% and just over 20% of these adolescents suffer from a severe mental disorder. The factor structure, internal consistency, and convergent and divergent validity as well as their relationship to quality of life are comparable to the original MAAS-A.Īdolescent mental disorders occur very frequently and lead to enormously high societal costs. Overall, this study has shown evidence of the first valid and reliable Dutch measure of mindfulness for adolescents. Further, adolescents with chronic disorders scored lower on the MAAS-A than adolescents without these disorders. Interestingly, adolescents without meditation experience scored higher on the MAAS-A than adolescents without this experience. Mindfulness as measured by the MAAS-A correlated positively with quality of life, but an expected positive relationship with acceptance was not found. Further, mindfulness was positively correlated with happiness, healthy self-regulation, and with another recently developed measure of mindfulness in children and adolescents, the Child and Adolescent Mindfulness Measure. Expected negative correlations between mindfulness and self-reported stress and emotion regulation strategies such as rumination and catastrophizing were found. The MAAS-A was shown to have high internal consistency.
A one-factor structure was demonstrated using principal component analysis and was further confirmed using confirmatory factor analysis. The MAAS-A and other questionnaires measuring other constructs were administered in high schools across the Netherlands. The factor structure and psychometric properties of the Dutch version of the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale for Adolescents (MAAS-A) was studied in a sample of adolescents ( n = 717 age range, 11–17 years) of the general population.