Jun 2, 2009 7:57 pm US/Eastern
Health Watch: Teens & Depression
Depression, unfortunately, is a common disorder, and it's one that affects people from every race and every walk of life, including teens.
When teenagers become depressed, they can experience debilitating effects.
"It can affect their school, their relationships with friends, [create an] increased risk for suicide and increased problems with drugs and alcohol," says Judy Garber, Ph.D., of the Department of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University.
It also makes it very likely that they'll have chronic depression as an adult. Vanderbilt University researchers studied more than 300 adolescents with a previous history of depression or with a parent who has a history of depression at four sites around the country – Nashville, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Portland, Ore.
Half the teens received usual care while the other half met for a weekly, then monthly group program aimed at helping them prevent future depressive episodes.
"We focused on looking at how they were thinking about things, particularly how they deal with stress when a stressor occurs; do they blame themselves; do they think that things are going to be terrible forever. So we get them to kind of look realistically at what are the consequences of the events, consequences of their own actions, and then what they can do about it," says Garber.
The study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that over nine months of follow-up, those who were in the prevention program had an 11.7 percent lower incidence of depression compared to those who weren't. However, within the prevention group, teens with a depressed parent when the study began were much more likely – 31.2 percent – to experience a bout of depression than those with parents who were not currently depressed.
"Parental depression seemed to moderate whether or not the group was going to have an effect on them and that was a pretty big difference," says Garber.
But since many of the teens did benefit from the prevention program, researchers say there's the potential to affect many lives. It can increase productivity, improve their ability to do schoolwork, improve social relationships, and perhaps keep them from becoming depressed as adults.
The study's authors said more research needs to be done regarding how parental depression affects their children's mental health.
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