Depression

Welcome to the Depression in Children and Adolescents themed edition of The Bridge. You can see from the broad range of articles that there is much research activity on the topic of adolescent depression, which reflects how common this disorder is in young people. For an overview of depression in children and young people, I suggest, look at ACAMH’s topic guide.  The research highlights in The Bridge provide useful update to the ‘topic guide’ on depression.

The summary of Goodyer et al’s Practitioner’s Review in this edition states that evidence suggests that depressive disorder in adolescents does respond to treatment with active therapies. The challenge for researchers and clinicians is in working out how different treatments work and which one will work best for which young person. I know from my own clinical practice that depressive disorder can be highly debilitating and interfere greatly with development of affected young people. It also affects their ability to access education. Goodyer and colleagues highlight the need to identify and target new ways of treating young people with treatment resistant depression to prevent significant long term morbidity. Depression can also be a recurrent condition and there is little evidence yet to help us to prevent relapse or recurrence. Much research needs to be done to relieve this common condition.

I hope you find this edition helpful. This pdf has some of the articles from the Depression issue of The Bridge, please feel free to share this and the direct links below with colleagues. Email publications@acamh.org with details of what you’d like to see in future.