Psychiatric outcome of burned children and adolescents.

Recent medical and surgical advances allow many severely burned patients to survive who formally would have died. Assessment of psychiatric outcomes with these patients may provide ways of measuring effects of acute burn care methods on later quality of life, specify more accurately their emotional needs during rehabilitation, and stimulate further research. Thirty children, aged 7 to 19, with severe burns are compared with 30 nonburned subjects matched for age, sex, SES, and parents' marital status according to DSM-III criteria. The burned children had significantly higher levels of overanxious disorder, phobias, and enuresis, but they had the same rates of present depressive disorders.