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| Signs of depression in preschoolers while teen suicides fourth highest among Western nations |
| Health |
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Stressed parents and young lives that are “over-programmed” may be at least part of the reason why researchers have found that close to 15 per cent of Quebec-born preschoolers show signs of feeling depressed, the Montreal Gazette reported. “They’re being put under a tremendous amount of pressure to achieve certain milestones at earlier and earlier ages,” said Montreal psychologist Abe Worenklein. Over six years, a research team from the universities of Montreal, Laval, McGill and others interviewed a representative sample of 1,758 mothers of preschool boys and girls. They asked them if their kids seemed nervous, high-strung or tense, fearful or anxious, worried, not as happy as other children or had difficulty having fun. As the team reported in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, they determined that 14.7 per cent of children between five months and five years old displayed abnormally high levels of depression and anxiety. They also found that this was more likely to show up among children whose mothers have a history of depression. “Our study is the first to show that infant temperament and lifetime maternal depression can lead to a high trajectory of depressive and anxiety problems before school entry,” said lead author Sylvana Côté, a professor at the University of Montreal’s department of social and preventive medicine. Côté noted the indicators that a child is at a higher risk of developing high levels of depression and anxiety can show up at a very early age. “Difficult temperament at five months was the most important predictor of depression and anxiety in the children,” she said. The “second most important predictor” of atypically high depressive and anxiety problems among preschoolers, Côté added, was “lifetime maternal depression.” She said it was critical that health professionals identify these problems as early as possible so that high-risk children and mothers can receive preventative treatments, such as cognitive behaviour or talk therapy and parenting training. But parents also need to know what to look for. “The big areas to look at,” psychologist Steven Schachter told the Gazette, “are difficulties to sleep, changes in appetite or concentration, lack of interest in things they used to find pleasurable, suddenly aggressive behaviour.” Meanwhile, a new study by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development of young people in Western nations found that the suicide rate among Canada’s teenagers was significantly higher than average, the Ottawa Citizen reported. The rate was 14.7 suicides per 100,000 boys and 5.1 per 100,000 girls aged 15 to 19, compared to OECD rates of 10.2 and 3.4 respectively. Of the 29 countries surveyed, only Norway, Finland and New Zealand ranked higher than Canada in terms of the overall suicide rate for both sexes. The study also revealed that while Canada’s teens ranked third after the United States and Sweden as being among the least likely to smoke, they ranked fourth after Britain, Denmark and Finland in having had at least two bouts of drunkenness. |
