Author of Can Preschoolers be Depressed? Pamela Paul, speaks to the complexities of diagnosing depression in young children. She says that while there are many reasons for refraining from categorizing developing children, it is useful to know that there are interventions that might help.

Having over fifteen years of experience using EMDR for treating symptoms of mood, spirit and body, I absolutely believe that there are creative approaches to activating the brain’s neuroplasticity during the early years - in such ways that may offset the neural tendencies that direct depression. Paul points out that “the brain literally changes course when you prod it in a given direction,” and it does. May we derive some hope here that as we continue to learn more about the healing powers inherent in the brain, we come to discover new ways to empower children and their families.

Here are some exerpts I found of interest:

• “Depression was originally seen as an adult problem with origins in childhood, rather than something that existed in children. The psychoanalytic view was that children didn’t have the mental capacity for depression; their superegos were not sufficiently developed.”
• “One of the most important mental-health discoveries of the past 10 to 20 years has been that chronic mental illnesses are predominantly illnesses of the young,” says Daniel Pine, chief of the emotion-and-development branch in the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program of the National Institute of Mental Health. They begin when we are young and affect us, often profoundly, during the childhood years, shaping the adults we become.
• Controversy over whether major depression could occur in teenagers, something we now take as a given, persisted until the 1980s. First adolescents, then grade-school children were considered too psychologically immature to be depressed. Stigma was a major fear. “There was this big worry that once you labeled it, you actually had it,” explains Neal Ryan, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. By the early 1990s psychiatrists had come to recognize that depression occurs in children of 8, 9 and 10.
• Still, in 1990, when Luby first broached the subject of whether children could be depressed even before they entered school, her colleagues’ reactions ranged from disinterest to hostility. Then in the late ’90s, the study of early childhood entered a kind of vogue among academics and policy makers. This was the era of President Clinton’s White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning, and there was a wave of interest in the importance of what was termed “0 to 3.”
• “We realized, Gee, maybe we better look more carefully at preschool, too,” Pine says. “And that’s where we are today. The issue of diagnosis of depression in preschoolers is being looked at very carefully right now.”
• Diagnosis of any mental disorder at this young age is subject to debate. No one wants to pathologize a typical preschooler’s tantrums, mood swings and torrent of developmental stages. Grandparents are highly suspicious; parents often don’t want to know.
• Some in the field have reservations, too. Classifying preschool depression as a medical disorder carries a risk of disease-mongering. “Given the influence of Big Pharma, we have to be sure that every time a child’s ice cream falls off the cone and he cries, we don’t label him depressed,” cautions Rahil Briggs, an infant-toddler psychologist at Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in New York.”

To read the entire article on NYTimes, click here.

Tags: childhood development, children, depression, diagnosis

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 28th, 2010 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Children & Teens, Emotional Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.