The current body of knowledge on the prevalence rate of psychiatric morbidity among adolescents and youth within the juvenile justice system in sub-Saharan Africa is yet to be systematically synthesized.. Consequently, African literature in the field has remained obscure, out of consideration in global discourses around the subject.; and incoherent to policy-makers. The situation has also hampered the identification of and filling of regional research-gaps in the field. The aim of this study, therefore, was to conduct a systematic scoping review of available data on psychiatric morbidity among adolescents and youth within the juvenile justice system in sub-Saharan Africa. The search was conducted using PubMed/MEDLINE, Science Direct, EMBASE, CINAHL and Psych Info. Additional searches were done in Google Scholar and African Journal Online (AJOL) databases. Twenty-six studies from 21 different research projects were identified. More than two-thirds were conducted in Nigeria and published within the last decade. Similar to what has been established around the world, the prevalence rate of psychiatric disorder was often very high, with a range of 59.7% - 63.0% among respondents. Key strengths of identified studies included use of standardized clinician-administered instruments for assessment and exploration of a wide range of psychiatric disorders. The main weaknesses in the studies included male gender-bias, lack of normative comparison groups, emphasis on custodial settings with little data on non-custodial systems, and considerable length of time-lag between the points of incarceration and psychiatric evaluation among the samples studied.. The study concluded that a modest number of studies have been conducted on psychiatric morbidity among justice-involved adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa, but there are still significant research gaps which could be bridged in order to aid context-appropriate interventions.

中文翻译：

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撒哈拉以南非洲青少年司法系统所涉青少年的精神疾病发病率：对当前研究和研究空白的系统界定。

撒哈拉以南非洲青少年司法系统内青少年和年轻人中精神病患病率的现有知识体系尚待系统地综合。因此，该领域的非洲文献仍然不为人所知，这在全球范围内已被忽略。有关该主题的论述。并且与决策者不一致。这种情况也阻碍了对实地区域研究差距的确定和填补。因此，本研究的目的是对撒哈拉以南非洲青少年司法系统内青少年和青少年精神病发病率的可用数据进行系统的范围界定审查。使用PubMed / MEDLINE，Science Direct，EMBASE，CINAHL和Psych Info进行搜索。在Google学术搜索和非洲在线杂志（AJOL）数据库中进行了其他搜索。确定了来自21个不同研究项目的26项研究。在过去十年中，超过三分之二在尼日利亚进行了发行。与世界各地的情况相似，精神障碍的患病率通常很高，受访者的患病率介于59.7％-63.0％之间。已确定研究的主要优势包括使用标准化的临床医生管理的工具来评估和探索各种精神疾病。研究的主要弱点包括男性性别偏见，缺乏规范性的比较人群，对监护环境的重视以及关于非监护系统的数据很少，