Review on depression - Article Example

Depression in Adolescence – Article Review Depression in Adolescence – Article Review Introduction There is a belief prevailing among professionals as well as laymen that the period of adolescence is beset by stress, severe moodiness, as also with constant preoccupation with the self. However, recent research belies this belief.Many research reports published towards the end of the 1960s reveal that many adolescents negotiate this particular period in their lives without any major psychological problems.

In fact most adolescents, irrespective of sex, successfully traverse this period of development by forging a constructive sense of personal identity, and can fashion relationships of an adaptive peer nature, while maintaining intimate relationships with their own families. However, research done in the 1970s showed that emotional difficulties in adolescence often developed into grave psychiatric disorders during adulthood. All these have helped in the recognition of depressive symptoms as apposite subjects of research in adolescents and as such the number of studies on the subjects has exploded.

Depression in adolescentsThere are essentially three classifications of adolescent psychopathology. They are 1) depressed mood 2) depressive syndromes and 3) clinical depression. In the study of depressed mood, depressive emotions as well as other characteristics adolescent development are involved. The depressive syndrome approach presumes that depression as also some other syndromes reveal the co-occurrence of emotions and behaviors as quantitative deviations from the norm. The clinical approach is founded on suppositions of a disorder or disease model of psychopathology.

Depressed MoodStudies on depressed mood are concerned with depression essentially as a symptom and refer to the incidence of unhappiness, sadness or blue feelings for an indeterminate period of time. No postulations are made on either the presence or absence of any other symptom. Depressed mood is normally determined by means of adolescents self-reports concerning their emotions, by way of measures particularly concerned with mood or included in the checklists of depressive symptoms.Depressive SyndromesMultifarious experiential approaches to the evaluation of adolescent psychopathology, including depression, have revealed that facets of depression are related to several other problems.

Depression is observed as a assemblage of emotions and behaviors that have been observed statistically to transpire together in an interpretable mode at rates that go beyond chance, sans implying any specific model for either the nature or the cause of such associated symptoms which can include anxiety also, and found to be founded on symptoms like crying, feeling lonely, apprehension of committing bad things, a wish to be perfect, feeling unloved, a belief that others are coming out to get him/her, feelings of unworthiness, nervousness, fear, guilt, suspicion, self-consciousness, sadness and worries.

This collection of symptoms is in turn associated with withdrawn feelings, somatic complaints, and social, thought and attention problems, and delinquent, aggressive and self-destructive behavior. Clinical DepressionThe American Psychiatric Association has developed a diagnostic model to diagnose clinical depression. This model bases the diagnosis on an analysis of the presence, duration, as well as the severity of groups of symptoms. It assumes the presence of a certain syndrome and its attendant symptoms, as also that such symptoms are related to important levels of existing disability or distress and an increased risk of harm in the persons current functioning.

ReferencePetersen, A.C., Compas, B.E., Gunn, J.B., Stemmler, M., Ey, S. & Grant, K.E. (1993). Depression in Adolescence. American Psychological Association, 48(2), p 155-168.