Driving Home: Parental Commuting and Symptoms of Teen Depression

Originally published in 1999 as the doctoral dissertation:

Driving Home: Parental Commuting and Depressive Symptoms in Young Adolescents

The following corresponds to pages 27-40 in the hardcopy dissertation:

CHAPTER 2   REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE (continued)

Early Adolescent Depression       

Depression as a Symptom, Syndrome or Disorder: 

Diagnostic and Classification Issues      

Prevalence Rates of Depression 

Aspects of Early Adolescent Depression Relevant to Commuting    

Attachment, Loss, and Mourning 

Inadequate Coping and Cognition          

Emotional Regulation and Vulnerability to Depression          

Early Adolescent Depression

Depression as a Symptom, Syndrome or Disorder:  Diagnostic and Classification Issues

            If a child complains of being sad and has a dysphoric mood, it does not mean that the child is depressed.  While dysphoria may be a necessary condition of the syndrome of depression, it is an insufficient criterion in itself.  Depressed affect or dysphoria is a characteristic of  both clinical and non-clinical populations of children (Kolvin, 1995).

The DSM-IV (1994) distinguishes between varieties of depressive disorders, including Dysthymia and Major Depressive Disorder. What distinguishes all varieties of depressive disorders from depressed affect is that a disorder represents a syndrome that persists over time and impairs the functioning of the child.  Thus, unless the child or adolescent has enough self-monitoring abilities to accurately report on the duration of their symptoms, it  becomes more difficult to assess the syndrome of depression from a self-report depression inventory administered at a single point in time.  Obviously, if a child’s dysphoria is severe enough to be suicidal, then it suggests that the depressive symptoms have been present for a longer duration.  However, cross-sectional measurement of most of the prominent symptoms of depression (e.g., sadness, anhedonia, increased fatigue, psychomotor retardation) does not establish duration or the extent to which these symptoms are disruptive to the adolescent’s functioning.

For this reason, depression inventories such as the Beck Depression Inventory and the Children’s Depression Inventory (Kovacs, 1983), require comparisons with how a person feels now versus how he or she has felt in prior weeks.  While high scores on the child symptom questionnaires have been shown to have a high correlation with depression as a syndrome (Kovacs, 1992), it important to note that a depression level score represents something that is similar but not identical to one of the syndromes of clinical depression.  Clinical depressive disorders involve a constellation of symptoms such as anhedonia, weeping, loss of energy, loss of appetite, lack of concentration and including depressed affect.  While depressed affect (a single symptom) must be distinguished clearly from a depressive syndrome (a constellation of symptoms), a high score on a depression inventory should be seen as much closer to measuring the depression as a syndrome.

The significance of these classification issues for the present study is that commuting behavior may or may not contribute to the conscious sadness of children. Commute length of parents, however, may correlate with a constellation of symptoms either with or without overt sadness.  The child or adolescent may or may not be aware of an association between the overall constellation of symptoms being experienced and parental commuting behavior.

Prevalence Rates of Depression

According to Brooks-Gunn, Peterson, and Compas (1995), epidemiological studies suggest that the point prevalence for clinical depression is around 4% to 5% for adults and 1% to 3% for adolescents.  Brooks-Gunn and colleagues cite four studies (Blazer, George, & Lauderman, 1985; Fendrich, Warner, & Weissman, 1990; Rutter, Graham, Chadwick, & Yule, 1976; Weissman et al., 1987) which they used to determine prevelance.  In contrast to the prevalence of clinical depression, one third of all youth experience dysphoria or depressed affect an any point in time (Brooks-Gunn et al., 1995).