Tamsin Ford and colleagues have a nice article in a recent edition of the British Journal of Psychiatry, ("Psychiatric disorder among British children looked after by local authorities: comparison with children living in private households," 190, 319-325).

It's accompanied by a podcast interview between Dr Ford and Dr Raj Persaud, Consultant Psychiatrist at the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospitals & Gresham Professor for Public Understanding of Psychiatry in London, UK.

Content-wise the article interests me because it supports the need to answer the question 'What is the impact of state care on children's health and development?'. For all that has been written about state care, there is hardly any reliable evidence that's relevant.

There's good data indicating that rates of mental health problems of children in care run at between two and seven times that for the population as a whole. But having a mental health problem may predispose a child to care, rather than care being the cause of poor mental health. The study by Tamsin Ford and colleagues reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry article and the podcast discussion indicate that, for some children, state care may be the cause of mental health problems.

The British Journal of Psychiatrists podasts are available here. The interview with Tamsin Ford was in April 2007.