[Substance abuse and psychiatric disorders in homeless youth].

In contrast to other countries as USA, Australia and some European countries there are no German studies concerning psychiatric disorders in runaway and homeless children and adolescents. Although the presence of street youths faces a big problem, there is a deficit of empirical data among this group for the planning of more efficient differential programming. In this pilot study we investigated male and female street adolescents among ICD-10 respectively DSM-IV criteria. The goal of this study was to build gender-specific hypotheses and to investigate the applicability and practicability of the standardised diagnostic instruments assessing psychiatric and substance-related disorders.