The DREAMS consortium is a collaboration between four academic centers for child and adolescent psychiatry: Accare (Groningen), Karakter (Nijmegen), LUMC Curium (Leiden) and Levvel (Amsterdam). DREAMS was founded in 2020 to increase data-driven insights into psychiatric mental health problems of children and adolescents in the Netherlands. DREAMS is building a large-scale, harmonized database that can be used for e.g., research into risk and protective factors for mental health problems, trends over time, (transdiagnostic) profiles of mental health problems, and predictors of treatment outcomes.

Each year, about 25.000 children and adolescents enter care at one of the four DREAMS centers. Over the last 5 years, we have worked on restructuring and harmonizing the data that is collected in the context of care. That is, diagnostic classifications, care load, treatment, and a set of questionnaires that asses contextual factors (e.g., family functioning, lifestyle, and education), general mental health (based on the PROMIS questionnaires), and satisfaction with care (e.g., target realization and potential drop out reasons).

All data is stored in a central database, with new data waves entering the database every 6 months.

In the nearby future, the infrastructure of the centralized database will allow for external researchers to request and work with our data. Information about what data is available and how to apply will become available on the website.

For more information, please see the DREAMS website.

For a list of publications so far, please see this page

Contact person: Project leader: dr. Tinca Polderman, VKC Psyche, Amsterdam UMC

Email: tinca.polderman@amsterdamumc.nl