The Study On Classification Features And Trajectories Of Depressive Symptoms In Adolescents

The World Health Organization predicts that depression will be the second leading cause of death and disability in humans by 2020.Teenagers are vulnerable to depression.Depression not only endangers the physical and mental health of adolescents,but also places a heavy burden on families and society.Therefore,this study aims to provide a basis for the prevention and intervention of adolescent depression by exploring the occurrence and development of adolescent depression symptoms.This study consists of two parts: the first part aims at gaining insight into the hierarchy and heterogeneity of depression in adolescents and exploring the effects of gender,age,and whether the only children on the latent depressive symptoms in adolescents.5,086 adolescents completed the Chinese version of the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale(CES-D).Part two aims at gaining insight into the hierarchy and heterogeneity of depression in Chinese adolescents and to characterize developmental trajectories of depressive symptoms and variation in trajectories by gender among Chinese high school students.A diverse sample of Chinese high school students(N=1023)was assessed on seven occasions across a 21-month time period to characterize developmental trajectories of depressive symptoms.Using Latent Class Analysis(LCA)we examined the data to identify subtypes of depressive symptoms among Chinese community-based adolescents.Latent Growth Mixture Modeling(LGMM)was subsequently implemented to ascertain the relationships between latent classes and demographic covariates.Four latent classes of individuals with depressive symptoms displaying a pattern of hierarchical organization were identified.The four classes were ordered by the degree of severity,ranging from the students reporting the highest number of depressive symptoms to the lowest number: “probable clinical depression”,“subthreshold depression”,“mild depression” and “low depression”,accounting for 8.2%,19.2%,41.8% and 30.8% of total sample respectively.Further analyses revealed that compared to the “mild depression” class,the rest of three classes differed significantly across age groups and only child(vs.sibling)status.The results of study two shows that four distinct longitudinal patterns were identified.The four classes of “Moderately stable” Class,“High persistent” Class,“Low decreasing”Class and “Very Low decreasing” Class accounted for 19.6%,6.0%,36.5% and 38.0% of the total sample respectively.Adolescents’ depressive symptoms in the four groups did not fluctuate significantly over time.Moreover,our results suggested that although Chinese females were more likely to be members of all four groups,females were only significantly more likely than males to be members of the “Moderately stable” Class.Conclusion: Depression is a common psychological problem among teenagers and it should be highly concerned.Classifying adolescent according to the hierarchical and heterogeneous characteristics of depressive symptoms and their development trajectories helps to further understand the depressive symptoms and the characteristics of its development and to provide a basis for the effective identification of high-risk groups of depression and targeted prevention and intervention of different categories of adolescents.