Depression and Suicidal Behaviors among Adolescents

This chapter focuses on issues of incidence, prevalence, natural history, and etiologic factors in regard to depression and suicidal behaviors in adolescence.

Abstract

This chapter focuses on issues of incidence, prevalence, natural history, and etiologic factors in regard to depression and suicidal behaviors in adolescence. The available data on prevalence are quite limited. For example, there are almost no data on the prevalence of clinical depression among diverse ethnic minorities, different socioeconomic strata, and rural compared with urban populations. The same is true for the spectrum of suicidal behaviors. From the perspective of prevention and treatment as well as epidemiology, understanding the natural history of child and adolescent disorders is critical, yet there are essentially no data on incidence, duration, and recurrence of clinical depression and suicidal behaviors in minority populations. Further, comorbidity is increasingly recognized as a key phenomenological feature of psychiatric disorders among children and adults, yet there are basically no community-based epidemiologic data on the prevalence, incidence, and natural history of comorbity disorders with depression and suicidal behaviors in minority adolescents. A key to understanding disorders is understanding the role of developmental factors, but at present there are few data on the role of development in the manifestation of psychiatric problems, because there are few data from epidemiologic studies examining the relation between developmental milestones of stages and psychiatric syndromes such as depression and suicide.