Approximately one-fifth of all fathers and over one third of all mothers experience an episode of depression within the first 12 years of their child being born, with the first year having the highest risk, says a British study
One established [treatment] method is called Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, or P.C.I.T. Originally developed in the 1970s to treat disruptive disorders — which typically include violent or aggressive behavior in preschoolers — P.C.I.T. is generally a short-term program, usually 10 to 16 weeks under the supervision of a trained therapist, with ongoing follow-up in the home. Luby adapted the program for depression and began using it in 2007 in an ongoing study on a potential treatment. During each weekly hourlong session, parents are taught to encourage their children to acquire emotion regulation, stress management, guilt reparation and other coping skills. The hope is that children will learn to handle depressive symptoms and parents will reinforce those lessons.
More college students are grappling with depression and anxiety disorders than they did a decade ago, according to research presented at the annual conference of the American Psychological Association. And with greater diagnoses of depression and anxiety has come a related rise in the number of college students on psychiatric medications.
According to Grossman and Kross, however, not all brooders and ruminators are created equal. While American brooders showed extremely high levels of depressive symptomatology (as measured by the Beck Depression Inventory, or BDI), Russian brooders were actually less likely to be depressed than non-brooders. This suggests that brooding, or ruminative self-reflection, has extremely different psychiatric outcomes depending on the culture. While rumination makes Americans depressed, it actually seems to provide an emotional buffer for Russians.
Happy? Angry? Anxious? How can we measure animal emotions? To understand how animals experience the world and how they should be treated, people need to better understand their emotional lives. A new review of animal emotion suggests that, as in humans, emotions may tell animals about how dangerous or opportunity-laden their world is, and guide the choices that they make.
Researchers say that their work suggests that teens who use the Internet pathologically may be about 2.5 times more likely to develop depression than teens who are not addicted to the Internet.
A new study suggests infants who receive strong affection from their mothers are well equipped to cope with life stressors as adults. Although the sample is small, the research is meaningful. Most prior studies have relied on recall; few have tracked participants from childhood to adult life, say the authors.