Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ArticlesPhenomenology of Depression in Young 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.