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Childhood Depression

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What is Depression? Most adults and many children and adolescents have a few bad days here and there, sometimes three or four in a row. When this happens, your mood is bad, you feel like jumping on people for nothing. You sleep, but you do not rest. You eat, but you are not hungry. Your life is one big chore. Everything that was fun is work and what usually is work is like walking with lead boots. Often you have stomach aches, headaches, aching, dizziness and other symptoms, but the doctors can not find anything wrong. When family and friends want to talk, you do not listen. If you can, you stay alone and wish they would all just go away. And you think about what you have got to do, and you wish you could put it off for ever. And about …show more content…

Training programs can be implemented for school staff about childhood depression (Dubuque, 1998). To assist in identification of children in need of intervention, a variety of instruments to assess depression in children are available, including: "The Children's Depression Inventory (CDI), The Children's Depression Scale (CDS), The Reynolds Adolescent Depression Scale (RADS), The Reynolds Child Depression Scale, and The SAD Persons Scale" (Ramsey, 1994). Reynolds (1990) reports that although School Psychologists do not usually use clinical interviews but they appear to be one of the most effective means of assessment of depression. Clinical interviews allow an exploration of symptoms, information regarding whether possible symptoms are related to depression, or other factors (Reynolds, 1990). According to Dixon, (1987), there are four types of depression: normal, chronic, crisis, and clinical. the four types are distinguished by degree, intensity, duration, cause, hopefulness, response to treatment and level of functioning (Dixon, 1997). Normal depression is defined as mild periods of depression, linked to certain events that affect a student's mood periodically (Ramsey, 1994). Chronic depression involves frequent "bouts" of depression, often without an identifiable cause (Ramsey, 1994). Depression in a crisis state usually reflects a lack of problem-solving skills, and can be accompanied by feelings of "sadness,

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