DREAMS is a (research) collaboration between four centres for academic child and adolescent psychiatry in the Netherlands: Accare (Groningen), Karakter (Nijmegen), LUMC Curium (Leiden) and Levvel (Amsterdam). This collaboration was founded to enable large scale research inchild and adolescent mental health, to provide data driven insights for care improvement.
Over the last five years, we have worked on harmonizing our questionnaires in order to create a structured, large-scale dataset of children and adolescents entering care and their parents/caregivers. Data collection with these new questionnaires has started in Summer 2025 and the first data waves are expected to enter our central database in Summer 2026.
Children and adolescents entering care at our organizations present with moderate, but often severe psychological and psychiatric symptoms, referred by primary or even secondary care. The four organizations offer diagnostic services and mental health care, as well as highly specialized treatments and in-patient care. This makes our population a large and diverse group. For a first overview of our population in terms of age, sex and diagnoses, please see this Profile paper.
The questionnaires we collect (intake and routine monitoring) are stored in a central database, along with information on diagnoses and care utilization. Soon, it will be possible to use our data for scientific research as an external researcher. More information about what data will become available and how to request access can be found on this page.
Researchers working at the four organisations are already working with the data available on many research projects, with varying topics and interests. An overview of the topics currently already being worked on can be found on this page.
An overview of already published articles can be found here (note: this list also contains Dutch publications)
For other questions about our data, collaboration or our projects, please contact us through the contact form on this website!