Mental Health, Adherence, and Self-Management Among Children with Diabetes

Nowadays, the investigation of mental health is a popular and important topic. Several national and international researchers have been trying to discover the different mechanisms, effects and efficacy among healthy people and patients diagnosed with chronic diseases. It is particularly important to monitor this phenomenon in childhood and adolescence regularly. The developmental processes are further hampered by the physical, mental, social and spiritual development due to the different illnesses. Therefore, it is clear that mapping mental health and various therapeutic procedures, as well as their positive and negative effects, are of paramount importance in diabetes and obesity.

In this research, after analysing the scales of ten international questionnaires, a complex Diabetes Adherence Questionnaire with 58 statements was created, the characteristics and subscales of which (1. Self-management; 2. Emotional feedback - emotional reactions associated with blood sugar level measurement; 3. Social support - parents and family; 4. Social support - peer relationships; 5. Denial of the disease; 6. Positive consequences of adherence; 7. Negative consequences of adherence, pain, discomfort, burden; 8. Relationship with the medical team; 9. Concern about the future) are described in the present book chapter. We also introduce our latest research findings on the relationship between adherence and mental health, covering selfevaluated health and quality of life, satisfaction with life, subjective well-being, vision and depression, stating that positive variables show a positive while negative variables correlate negatively with adherence. 

Keywords: T1DM, Adherence, Denial of the disease, Depression, Diabetes Adherence Questionnaire, Emotional feedback, Negative adherence (the burden of the treatment), Positive adherence, Quality of life, Self-management, Self-rated health, Social support (medical team) vision (worries), Social support (parents and family), Social support (peer relationships).