Introduction: The evaluation of dysfunctional attitudes and coping mechanisms to identify specific characteristics of certain psychiatric diseases is an important research objective also in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry.
Method: Authors compared dysfunctional attitudes and coping strategies of various monodiagnostic groups recruited from a sample of 158 adolescent outpatients (54 males, mean age 16.0 SD 1.16 and 104 females, mean age 15.9 SD 1.11) suffering from major depression (n=35), dysthymia (n=20), social phobia (n=11), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD n=12), conduct disorder (n=15) and adjustment disorder (n=65). The questionnaires and tests used in the study were the shortened standard Hungarian version a) of Dysfunctional Attitude Scale (DAS, Burns 1980) and b) of Ways of Coping Checklist (Folkmann et al 1986). Patients were collected from the 5-county, representative, cross-sectional pool of "Pannonia" Transdanubian Adolescent Psychiatric Survey. Diagnoses were confirmed by the M.I.N.I. International Neuropsychiatric Diagnostic Interview, Hungarian version, and patients with comorbid diagnoses were excluded from the study.
Results: Contrary to expectations, the patient samples differed from one another significantly only in a few test items, but all the differences that had been found were as expected between the internalizing (overcontrolled) and externalizing (undercontrolled) disorder domains. The MD group had a significantly higher score in achievement scale than those in the group of adjustment disorder (behavioural subtype). Dysthymic adolescents had a significantly higher level of support seeking than the patients suffering from conduct disorder. The variation seen in some parameters (autonomy and passive coping scales) of two samples of the internalizing disorder group and of externalizing one (behaviour disorder and adjustment disorder samples) was probably due to the differences among groups in the ratio of sex.
Consequences: Coping tests used in adult psychological studies are useful and confirm the occurrence of some typical mechanisms in adolescence too, but there exist strong need for more specific methods to identify adolescent coping qualities.