The early detection and treatment of individuals at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis is considered as the most promising strategy to reduce the immense burden of psychotic disorders. Outcome and,relatedly, burden are even worst in early onset psychosis, with the first episode starting before the age of 18 years. Nevertheless, research in this filed has mostly been carried out in adults, while little consideration of possible specific requirements in children and adolescents has been considered to date. Thus, several authors have recently argued that the validity of current at-risk and psychotic-onset criteria developed for adults still need to be confirmed in children and adolescents.
The aim of this symposium is to examine the specificity of the CHR condition in children and adolescents from different points of views. The first talk will focus on the age effects in the clinical significance of symptoms used in detecting CHR for psychosis. Following, we present findings from a study on the twelve-month predictive value of CHR criteria in children and adolescents. The third talk will focus on the application of a network approach to increase the ability of detecting at risk conditions. The fourth and last talk will focus on the rationale and case example of why mentalization-based therapy should be empirically tested in adolescents with CHR.