Mediation of the risk of serious police or legal trouble in adults with a mental disorder.

Earthquakes cause substantial economic losses, structural damage, population displacement, and fatalities (Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, ), along with adverse psychological outcomes among survivors (Cénat, McIntee, & Blais-Rochette, ). Among these, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition particularly associated with earthquakes (Sirotich & Camisasca, ). PTSD arises following direct exposure (experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event) or indirect exposure (learning that a traumatic event occurred to a close relative, or experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of the event) (American Psychiatric Association, ). The disorder is characterized by four symptom clusters: intrusive symptoms, avoidance, negative alterations in cognition and mood, and changes in arousal and reactivity (American Psychiatric Association, ). Children and adolescents are especially vulnerable to developing PTSD symptoms after earthquakes due to their dependence on adults (Blanc et al., ), and their symptoms often persist for up to a decade (Wang, Wu, & Zhou, ). Thus, understanding the long-term developmental pathological characteristics of PTSD symptoms in this population is critical. In recent years, the network theory of psychopathology (Borsboom, ) has proposed that PTSD arises from interactions among its symptoms, a framework that disentangles the heterogeneity of symptoms and their interconnections to provide more precise insights into etiology and intervention (Birkeland, Greene, & Spiller, ; Borsboom, ). Although most studies have examined cross-sectional symptom networks (Birkeland, Greene, & Spiller, ), the severity of children’s and adolescents’ PTSD symptoms and their interconnections are known to evolve and fluctuate over time (Hong & Efferth, ; Liang, Cheng, Ruzek, & Liu, ; Ma et al., ; Wang, Wu, & Zhou, ). Therefore, scholars have argued that dynamic temporal networks offer a more robust reference, particularly those that account for within-person change characteristics (Borsboom, ; Bridges-Curry, ; Grimes et al., ). Identifying network features that hold clinical significance through dynamic temporal networks is crucial. Previous research has emphasized the centrality of nodes (symptoms) within these networks (Birkeland, Greene, & Spiller, ; Bridges-Curry, ). However, this approach has several limitations. In cross-sectional networks, a symptom may appear to be central and thus a target for intervention. Yet, if this symptom is a consequence rather than a cause of other symptoms, targeting it may not lead to reductions in other symptoms (Grimes et al., ). Although longitudinal networks offer some degree of causal inference, the replicability of identified core PTSD symptoms remains poor due to variations in study intervals, types of trauma, and sample differences across studies (Birkeland, Greene, & Spiller, ; Bridges-Curry, ; Ma et al., ; Wu et al., ). Consequently, the clinical utility of emphasizing centrality within the complex system of psychological networks has been increasingly questioned by many researchers (Bringmann et al., ; Grimes et al., ).