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Phenomenology of Depression in Young Girls

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ABSTRACT

Objective

To examine the prevalence of depressive symptoms, the overlap between caregiver and child report, the association between depression and anxiety, and the relationship between symptoms of depression and impairment in young girls.

Method

Participants in the Pittsburgh Girls Study, a community sample of 2,451 girls aged 5–8 years old and their primary caregivers were interviewed in 2000–2001 using the Child Symptom Inventory and the Short Moods and Feelings Questionnaire to measure depression, the Screen for Child Anxiety and Related Emotional Disorders to measure anxiety, and the Children's Global Assessment Scale to measure impairment.

Results

Less than 1% of 5- to 8-year-old girls had five or more symptoms of major depression according to the caregiver report. Individual differences in symptom counts and depression scores by caregiver and child report were observed. Agreement between caregivers and girls on depression symptoms was low, with only 2% of the variance in caregiver-reported depression on the Child Symptom Inventory being accounted for by child report on the Short Moods and Feelings Questionnaire. The level of association between depression and anxiety scores suggested that these constructs are associated but relatively independent in young girls. Both caregiver report and child report of depressive symptoms were uniquely associated with impairment ratings.

Conclusions

Although major depression appears to be rare among 5- to 8-year-old girls, continuous measures of depressive symptoms yield significant individual differences that are associated with impairment. Thus, preliminary evidence suggests that depressive symptoms can be validly measured in 5- to 8-year-old girls.

Section snippets

Participants

In the PGS, a stratified, random household sampling, with oversampling of households in low-income neighborhoods, was used to identify girls who were between the ages of 5 and 8 years. Neighborhoods in which at least 25% of the families were living at or below the poverty level were fully enumerated (i.e., all homes were contacted to determine whether the household contained an eligible girl), and a random selection of 50% of the households in nonrisk neighborhoods were enumerated during 1998

Prevalence of Depressive Symptoms

The prevalence rates of positively endorsed items on the CSI are presented in Table 1. Primary caregivers rarely reported that a depressive symptom occurred “a lot” or “all the time.” Only two symptoms were reported to occur at that level of frequency in greater than 1% of the girls: “shows little interest in or enjoyment” (2.1%) and “has little confidence/highly self-conscious” (2.4%). Almost a third of the girls were reported to “sometimes” experience “having little confidence” or “feeling

DISCUSSION

This study is one of the first to report data on the prevalence of depression in young girls drawn from a large community-based sample. Given that depression is one of the most common mental disorders among adolescent females and that it is a disorder associated with significant impairment, generating information on the developmental phenomenology of this disorder should be a necessary part of the effort to develop and improve existing intervention and prevention programs. Our aim was to

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    This work was supported by grants R01 MH56630 and R01 MH66167 from the National Institute of Mental Health.

    Portions of this paper were presented at the Meeting of the International Society for Research in Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, Sydney, Australia, June 2003.

    The authors dedicate this work to the memory of their friend and colleague, Dr. Evelyn Wei.

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