Maternal common mental disorder symptoms among mothers of preschool children in Türkiye

Common Mental Health Disorders (CMDs) refer to depressive, anxiety, and somatic disorders. These disorders are prevalent and comorbid mental health problems. Children of mothers with CMDs are more likely to have developmental delays and poor health. Although it is a priority area, the traditional diagnostic approach to mental disorders hinders the understanding of the complex structure of CMDs. The current study adopts a non-diagnostic and symptom-focused approach to analyze the factor structure and stability of maternal common mental disorder (M-CMD) symptoms in a nationally representative sample of 1,052 mothers of preschool children over five years in Türkiye. The data was drawn from The Study of Early Childhood Developmental Ecologies in Turkey (ECDET). Multilevel Confirmatory Factor Analysis was conducted to examine the factor structure and the stability of M-CMD symptoms. Results presented a bifactor structure at the within-person and between-person levels. At the within-person level, there was (a) distress as a general factor, (b) a somatic subfactor, and (c) an anxious-suicidal subfactor. At the between-person level, there were (a) distress as a general factor, (b) somatic subfactor, and (c) negative affect subfactor. The findings of the current study had clinical and scientific significance in terms of understanding the maternal common mental disorder symptoms.