| Summary of Depression Research |
The purpose of this literature review is to determine the effectiveness of several school-based interventions for students with depression. Areas of effectiveness that are being evaluated include: (a) age/grade, (b) racial/cultural background, (c) setting, (d) targeted behavior, (e) duration of evaluation, (f) procedural integrity, (g) consumer satisfaction, and (h) link to assessment information. Below is a description of these preliminary findings. |
Seventeen depression studies were identified with a total of 1491 participants. The participants ranged in grade from first grade to seniors in high school. In the majority of the studies (88.2 %), the participants did not have a medical diagnosis of depression. However, these participants were identified as having depressive symptoms based on numerous rating scales/checklists and interviews. In the remaining 11.8% (2 of the 17) of the studies, the participants had diagnoses of either co-morbid depression and conduct disorder or schizoaffective disorder. Approximately 76.5 percent of the studies reported the racial/cultural background of the participants. Of these studies, 391 participants were reported as Caucasian, 54 Hispanic, and 144 African American. Four of the studies did not specify race; one reported that the participants came from predominantly low socioeconomic backgrounds, and the other reported that the participating schools were located in predominantly middle-class neighborhoods with 90% of enrolled students identified as White. Finally, one of the studies reported the racial background for the entire study but they focused on the results for one specific cohort of the study. The study did not specify the racial backgrounds of the cohort. |
The majority of the studies (88.2%) took place in a traditional school setting. The other two studies took place at either a community based public school program administered by special education cooperative or a residential therapeutic school setting. The majority of the studies targeted level of depression (94.1%). Of the 94.1%, 37.5% of the studies focused on depression alone. The remaining of these studies also targeted anxiety, anger, self-esteem, daily and major life stress events, negative or depressotypic automatic thoughts, internalizing coping responses/symptoms, and social skills, reading achievement, and problem behavior at home and in the classroom. The remaining study targeted the percentage of social responses of students with depression. The effect sizes for all the studies are currently being evaluated. The duration of the interventions for depression were as follows: for three of the studies (17.6%) the duration was not specified, for 23.5% of the studies the duration was five weeks, the remaining 58.8% of the studies had interventions that ranged from 3 days to eight weeks. In 52.9% of the studies, procedural integrity was assessed. Consumer satisfaction was ascertained in two out of the seventeen studies. In the first study, results indicated that 100% of the children and 94% of the parents rated the intervention (combined cognitive-behavioral family education) as helpful. For the second study, results indicated that 24 of the 50 participants rated intervention as “very helpful”, 25 of the 50 rated them as “somewhat helpful”, and one subject rated the intervention as “not helpful”. The study also reported on the enjoyment of the intervention: 32 of the 50 participants rated the treatment as “very enjoyable”, and 18 of the 50 rated it as “somewhat enjoyable”. None of the studies were linked to assessment information. This could be an area for future research. |
