Fig. 1

Patterns of service use based on five child and youth mental health service agencies across 4 years. The y-axis shows the probability of a child having at least one visit in each month. The x-axis shows months, starting with month 1 (the child’s first visit at the agency) through to the end of the observation period (4 years after the child’s first visit). For example, at month 11 a child in the Ongoing/Intensive-Episodic class had a 0.63 probability of a visit; in other words, 63% of this group of children were seen in month 11. At month 21, a child in the Intensive group had a 0.22 probability of being seen, whereas a child in the Brief Episodic group had only a 0.08 probability of being seen. Classes were labelled based on examination of the probability of visits over time and descriptive statistics on the overall duration of involvement and number of visits, along with the number and distribution of episodes of care (see Table 1 and Additional file 1)