“If they’re persistently sad, irritable or less motivated, those are markers that may indicate depression, even in kids as young as 3 or 4, and we would recommend that parents get them evaluated.”
Speaking from personal experience, if a 3 or 4 year old is displaying symptoms of depression, there's shit happening at home and the parents are neck-deep in denial about their role and pigs will fly before they get help for their kid.
> Speaking from personal experience, if a 3 or 4 year old is displaying symptoms of depression, there's shit happening at home and the parents are neck-deep in denial about their role and pigs will fly before they get help for their kid.
Depression definitely can be caused by abuse. In fact if you're being abused you are probably also depressed.
Depression and other mental illnesses are also often caused by things that can't be externally influenced at all.
Casually linking poor parenting with mental illness enforces a stigma that discourages people from seeking treatment for themselves or for their children.
I didn't read GPs post that way either, however I still agree with jetpks' point regarding depression. Mental illness is a medical condition so cannot be dismissed as a parenting problem. While some instances of depression will be symptoms of a child's home life, others will be medical.
I don't understand how the parenting problem being the root cause of the mental illness dismisses the mental illness.
Imagine if the child is sick (eg in pneumonia) it wouldn't dismiss the illness if I explained how the child got sick because their parents left them outside freezing.
It's not dismissing, it's analyzing the root cause, to try and help the child. If something causes illness (mental and/or physical), we should take care of both the illness and the cause.
In the case of depression, finding a true unique cause is still open for debate/research, but it shoudn't prevent us from helping someone who's depressed.
Depression is a vague overly-general term so it differs from person to person. There isn't going to be a "true unique cause". In some instances it's just a result of chemical imbalances rather than emotional conditioning from the parents. Thus you cannot brush depression of as being environmental.
A cause isn't necessarily environmental, it can be, and even if it is "a result of chemical imbalances", there's still a cause, and if we could find the causes for the multiple forms of mental illnesses wouldn't that be good?
What he is trying to get at, is that some mental illness are genetic, people are born with them, and due to people frequently insisting that they are always result of external factors, it leads to people that were born with genetic problems to not get treated as parents either are ashamed or feel insulted and refuse treatment.
(Disclaimer: this happened to me. I have confirmed ADHD and maybe aspergers too, but my parents were so offended when schools asked them to take me to a doctor that only now in my adulthood I am being treated properly)
Depression is caused by more than just external events. Yes, based on personal experience, but there are more factors to be considered and fixing one issue may not solve the problem.
Fine. A more reasoned response might be to assert that in at least some cases, young children exhibiting signs of depression are reacting to severe problems at home. In those cases, expecting the parents to pursue treatment for the child might be overly optimistic. It might have been nice if the article had mentioned that as a potential complicating factor and how other, less immediate family or friends might notice these signs and find ways to facilitate some kind of evaluation or intervention. How's that?
There is also genetic factor. Infant depression can happen in a perfectly fine family. Of course if parents don't know how to deal with this problem it will get worse. Education helps.
Ok, so in your claimed expert opinion, depressed kids are depressed because of the parents actions; and their parents won't ever give a shit. But so what? Why write that?
The folks doing this research know more than you do about the causes of their depression; and they know more than you do about the difficulties in addressing any causes. But unlike you, instead of implying that they're foolish for trying to make the world better, they're just trying to make the world better.
Most victories are long, hard slogs. I respect people who undertake those slogs, knowing that victory is not assured. I have no respect for those who throw rocks at them.
I disagree. You and I know that personal experience isn't good to generalize from. But in my personal experience, the vast majority of the time that people use the phrase, they do so to communicate that they know things to be a certain way, at least strongly enough to base other conclusions on.
Your take that depression is caused by bad home circumstances is true for some cases, but there are many causes for depression in between, most of them not even close to being understood. Genetics, immune disease, thyroid problems, etc. The list is pretty huge.
As for expecting parents to notice; a trained psychiatric professional cannot diagnose depression by regular life observation alone. They rely on self reporting, or suicide attempts. Anything less than that is extremely hard to pick up on.
I can attest to this. Grew up with Bipolar II, and Christmas was always the worst due to the dissonance of the joy around you and your own bad feelings. Birthdays were worse, because then you couldn't escape the attention. I specifically requested to stop having birthday parties -rather to just have a small family dinner. I think my parents were just baffled, thought I was moody/cynical.
I really wish I was diagnosed earlier, but what can you do? It breaks my heart to think of any kid going through the same thing and it just being dismissed, but what are they supposed to do? If you're going to get a proper diagnosis you need a referral to see a psychiatrist. If you're a bit iffy and the doctor doesn't think a referral is in order you're likely to wind up with a number of wrong diagnoses. I don't think at that age I was even capable of explaining all my symptoms thoroughly enough for even a psychiatrist to figure out the whole picture.
This is why physical diagnoses needs to step up to the plate. There needs to be a blood test, or something like it, rather than having to rely on baffled parents, or patients who might not even realize certain symptoms are even worth bringing up at all.
According to Wikipedia, Bipolar II is hard to diagnose. A lot of personality disorders also have an onset in late youth/early adulthood. IOW, you cannot diagnose those yet at a pre-teen age.
There's a big taboo concerning depression. It isn't regarded as a disease, in social life those who are negative tend to get avoided.
As for rewards like presents, I simply don't get the whole theatre behind it. It is just trading, often nowhere near original, and I too often don't know what on earth to buy for someone, ending up with cheesy things. You ask something, and you either get exactly what you want (no surprise), you get something you don't want and did not ask for (negative surprise) or you get something you did not ask for and do want (positive surprise). Now, how to make someone positively surprised if they already feel they got pretty much everything? If the only things they do want are rather expensive? If they don't need yet another cheap thing such as perfume while they already have their own expensive perfume brand which bottle is not even half empty? My point is that it can be extremely difficult to satisfy someone's needs. Not merely mine; the ones of all my peers. Now consider I was like this as a child as well (probably why I am like this now).
Perhaps therein lies the difference. The non depressed are happy to receive a gift, never mind that it is merely a custom whereas the depressed see through the custom. One could argue the latter is smarter, but is that true from a biological PoV?
I grew up with pretty left wing parents who were against consumerism. I liked the gifts and the principal of a fun pagan silly ritual where be re-express our love for one another. I never felt displeasure with being given a gift in my life. Guilt, maybe, that I couldn't show more pleasure in the situation, but kids are pretty good at hiding their emotions. Sometimes the act drops, and then observers just say you're having a bad day.
I find the idea that depressed people have a gift at seeing through fakery as troubling. It is a correlation and causation thing. If I was depressed everything seemed shit, even the stuff that wasn't fake, so of course it might look enlightened in certain situations. I think a lot of those studies are flawed pop-psychology type stuff that I wouldn't put much value in.
My birthday is always the worst day of the year. Of course, it's also in the depths of March, when it's freezing cold, icy, and dark. But it's also a silly custom that everyone else gets much too excited about, and so the disconnect between their expectations of my emotions and my lack of emotion about it is somewhat painful.
> I think my parents were just baffled, thought I was moody/cynical.
> There needs to be a blood test, or something like it, rather than having to rely on baffled parents, or patients who might not even realize certain symptoms are even worth bringing up at all.
And that's relying on the parents to even be looking for issues in their offspring. If they're narcissistic, the child could go undiagnosed.
You can't blame parents for their child's depression.
You can't expect even the most seasoned psychiatric worker to be able to diagnose depression from sight. Currently self-reporting is the only way to diagnose. Observation simply doesn't work.
There was a great doco on the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fm5ql) where they had a house full of people with various different mental illnesses, and trained psychiatric professionals watching on CCTV. Over the course of the show, not one of them made a correct diagnosis by observing behaviour. So how can parents be expected to pick up the signs?
I'll have to watch the documentary to be sure, but I find it hard to believe this is true.
Oftentimes, but definitely not always, it's surprising to me how easy it is to detect cases of childhood abuse, autism, bipolar disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder, based on very limited interaction.
Obviously one is never sure, but very often the symptoms are 'textbook' enough that at the very least an informed guess can be made.
I'm willing to say I'm entirely wrong about this though. It's just been my experience so far.
I can understand being able to pick up on autism, and some personality disorders. Mood disorders -- unless there is obvious suicide or psychosis -- can be tricky though. Some people are just really energetic, and fit, and excitable. Some people act out their emotions more than others so it can seem more than it really is.
Giving unsolicited diagnoses puts you at risk of being accused of being a 'gaslighter', etc. In many cases it's like if you see a really skinny person and are convinced they are anorexic... Some people are just skinny, just like many people put on weight alarmingly easy.
And then there's malingering psychosis -- there's a horror film. I'm pretty sure I knew someone like this, but I could never say anything (I suspected they had BPD and were feigning psychosis.)
The article doesn't say anything about Pr(Dislikes Rewards), but rather claims to have measured P(Diminished Response to Rewards | Clinical Depression Diagnosis) > P(Diminished Response to Rewards | !Diagnosis).
It's an 84 person study, done using EEG (a very rough measure of electrical activity in the brain), claiming a result largely related neurotransmitter release (ie not the sort of thing EEGs are usually used to measure). You should take their claims with a huge helping of salt.
The first one. They sorted the kids into Depressed and not-Depressed before measuring the reward response.
The second probability depends on the relative sizes of all four quadrants and your definition of "high". The truth of statement one does imply that it's higher, but how much higher is not discussed.
Wait, so they had kids choose a door and there was a 50% chance they get a point or lose a point? And that's what constitutes scientific research these days?
Did they even account for the kids figuring out that whether they win or lose is completely random and there's no skill or pattern involved? You know, like "what's even the point of trying if it's all random anyway"? Maybe that's why some kids weren't thrilled to get a point, because there was literally no effort required to get it, pure chance.
I don't know what the "scientists" expected, but I don't know a single person who goes into euphoria after they win a coin flip. Geez, they might all be at risk of clinical depression!!!!!!!
Isn't it more likely that these scientists do actually know what they are doing, and aren't actually the incompetent bumbling fools you seem to think?
I'm baffled that there is always a response to any scientific research along the lines of "Well, these scientists didn't take <obvious confounding factor> into account! They need to compensate for <list of random attributes I just thought up>."
Quite aside from the fact that appeal to authority is not how science is supposed to work, the current reproducibility crisis suggests that this sort of response need not be as baffling as you seem to find it.
To be clear, I doubt GP has accurately identified a confounder here; the comparison is between children diagnosed with depression and those not so diagnosed, performing the same task, so it's not as though differential response on the task is being used to identify depression. But the larger point that a result need not be taken on faith remains valid, as does the general advisability of knowing what you're talking about before you do so - which GP regrettably seems here to have overlooked.
>Although still analogous to “gambling” tasks used with older samples, the modified version uses varying level of prizes (e.g., poor prize = a single yellow pencil; a great prize = a doll o r nerf toys) instead of the typical monetary incentives. That is, young children do not have a c lear conception of money and its relative quantities; however, at very young ages, children r eactive positively to prizes and gifts. Prior to the task, children were shown 3 boxes of toys: each box had increasingly appealing toys (e.g., least appealing box included standard pencils, and the most appealing box included toys such as dolls and nerf toys). Children were told that wh en they guessed the correct door, they would see a green up arrow, and if they guessed the wrong door, they would see a red arrow pointing down. The experimenter explained that the box of to ys the children could pick from depended on the total number points they earned by guessing doors with either green vs red arrows behind them. Children were told that green arrows were worth 10 pts and red arrows were only worth 5 pts and that the more points they received the better the box they could choose from. The experiment explained that the computer would ke ep track of the number of green and red arrows and their total number of points.
"The experimenter explained that the box of to ys the children could pick from depended on the total number points they earned by guessing doors with either green vs red arrows behind them."
Sounds the same to me as what OP suggested. Even as a child (as early as I remember) I hated praise and rewards when I didn't feel I had deserved it by my own efforts. Guessing random events is not among things I consider conscious effort.
Furthermore, children background could have impact too: the one from poorer family would be happier to receive a small gift versus the one from rich family that already has a room full of all the toys he could want.
I don't have a reference offhand, but there's research that indicates that depressed people have more realistic outlooks on life, as contrasted with 'normal' people who are hopelessly optimistic. Maybe the depressed kids figured out quicker that the whole study was pointless?
So you're saying you didn't read the article then. Or you don't believe that gambling excites people. I look forward to your scientific paper where you try to reproduce the result.
So what makes non-depressed kids more smitten? What's interesting is that there is a differentiation between the two, not which is the 'right' way to behave.
You can throw your own emotional spin on this phenomenon if you like, but the scientist's job was to investigate whether there is a phenomenon of this sort, and they did just that.
That they're receptive to BS tests and more easily manipulated ?
> What's interesting is that there is a differentiation between the two, not which is the 'right' way to behave.
Interesting ? Of course there's a differentiation between the two, human brains don't operate the same.
But my point was with the common popular notion of claiming someone as depressed as something being notoriously bad with them and "not normal". What if the 'depressive realism' (as mentioned in this thread) is actually a feature that humans should develop to more rationally meet their choices in life? Now that's a question I find more interesting.
I think a better take away is the reverse. If you are rewarding children in your class (or your kids) and one is not enthusiastic then you should take note there might be a problem (essentially the first sentence of the article).
I'd be very careful here. Perhaps the particular reward is not perceived by the child as a reward? I can think of any number of things that one party might perceive as a reward that would be, to me, uncomfortable or meh.
Well, I think the research per the article tried to compensate for this by letting the children choose what would be the reward before hand, so theoretically, they're playing for something they actually want, not just party favors.
I'm not clever enough to know exactly how this could introduce a bias into this particular experiment (that is, how such an operation would affect the response of depressed children), but I suppose it could.
Frankly speaking I feel like the general premise is probably true, though the how on it is still unclear. I know extremely low self-esteeem and disbelief in adulation/rewards was pretty common for me when I was much deeper into depression. Even now I tend to be pretty dismissive of acknowledgements and rewards.
Interesting. Instead, kid enters the room, you tell them that they will be sitting there anywhere from 5 minutes to 3 hours, depending on how long the experiment should be. They get to choose a sequence of doors. At each step, the door can either contain +10 minutes or -10 minutes, representing the number of minutes which will be either added to or subtracted from their experiment duration, respectively.
My guess is that the depressed/bored children will now respond a little bit better to this experiment. It's just a guess -- but I think depressed/bored kids would tend to avoid spending time being bored in a little lab room.
I think a depressed person would be more likely to ignore all your doors, or open a few without caring one way or the other. But I'm not a psychiatrist.
I was hoping I wasn't the only one puzzled as to why "a reduced ability to experience joy is a key sign of clinical depression in young children" was newsworthy.
I hope the money invested in this research ends up enabling something that can help these poor kids. This is a real problem in our society.
Mrs. Berry was then left with the unpleasant realization that either her entire class was depressed, or scratch and sniff stickers were no longer cool.
Speaking from personal experience, if a 3 or 4 year old is displaying symptoms of depression, there's shit happening at home and the parents are neck-deep in denial about their role and pigs will fly before they get help for their kid.