Friday, 7 October 2011

An Alarming Increase Number of Depressed Children

Depression in children is noticeably rising as a longitudinal study conducted by the Washington University School of Medicine. The ratio of Major Depression Disorder (MDD) in preschool children is already the same among school-aged children as stated in the study. Antidepressant medication will be given to Preschool children once diagnosed. A new breakthrough states that Probiotic bacteria can improve symptoms of Anxiety and Depression.

The longitudinal study conducted by Dr. Luby and her colleagues states that among school-age children, the strongest predicted depression is a family history of depression.

What predicts childhood depression could be from genetics, depressed mother  and even stressful or traumatic events as well.

Jennifer Gibson, a brain blogger, wrote about how young is too young being diagnosed and stated that any parent can attest that the “terrible 2’s” as observed  from the said children are their   being moody and  temperamental during their  toddler stage.

Gibson also mentioned in her article that a new study funded by the United States National Institute of Mental Health and published in Archives of General Psychiatry showed evidence that depression in preschool-aged children can be a chronic condition and should be given out most attention by the parents.

Despite several studies have been conducted still  there is no findings about depressed pre-schoolers showing  delay in their development  and that treating depressed children ignites controversy to which there is already a growing number of  depressed children being prescribed with powerful psychiatric medications.

 Most experts encouraged psychotherapy as the first-line treatment among children and discouraging children from taking antidepressant medication such as Zoloft because it has not yet been carefully examined as a prescription for pre-schoolers.

A child’s emotional development must be something that every parents, teachers, and caregivers needs to know about.

The early intervention can prevent depression among children and they will not experience the several side effects of Zoloft which can cause Zoloft birth defects in women.

References:


http://brainblogger.com/2009/08/26/how-young-is-too-young-to-diagnose-depression/
http://columbiachildpsychologist.blogspot.com/2009/10/depression-in-pre-schoolers.html
http://psychcentral.com/lib/2007/children-and-depression/


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1 comment:

  1. Great Depression Timeline

    http://killdepresion.blogspot.com/2013/07/great-depression-timeline.html

    ReplyDelete