[Psychopathology, self concept and developmental delay in healthy and chronically ill adolescents. Results of a 4 1/2 year longitudinal study].

Psychopathology, self-concept and developmental delays in healthy and chronically ill adolescents: Results of a 4-1/2-year follow-up study. This contribution presents results obtained in a 4-1/2-year longitudinal study on 91 adolescents with diabetes and 107 healthy adolescents. We addressed the question of whether chronically ill adolescents show more psychopathological behaviors than healthy adolescents, and if so, whether there are changes within a time span of 4-1/2-years. In addition, we investigated whether adolescents with diabetes differ from healthy adolescents in their feelings of self-esteem and in their developmental status. The self-concept of healthy and diabetic adolescents proved to be very similar, and stable over time as well. As regards developmental status, the developmental delays seen in the diabetic subjects at the beginning of the study had disappeared by the end of the study. Throughout the study the diabetic adolescents appeared to be more "normal", showing significantly fewer symptoms of psychopathology than the healthy control group. Furthermore, the consistently higher values in social desirability among the diabetic subjects show that the strong denial in these subjects was stable over the 4-1/2-year period.