Depression Family Environment

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The Impact of Family Environment on Adolescents with Depression As if the road to recovery for teenagers with depression is not difficult enough on its own, it becomes even more so when they are not given enough support or stability in their own home. Instances have occurred where parents or friends do not believe in mental illnesses, therefore providing a discouraging home where the teenager is trying to cope. It is found in majority of cases that depression is related to “family environments characterized by an absence of supportive and facilitative interactions” (Sheeber & Sorensen, 1998). The home environment of depressed adolescents is not a positive place for them to try and recover, as many parents make them hostile and hinder their …show more content…
Another limitation they wrote is the self-report measure and how the accuracy of it is not truly known. Sheeber and Sorensen mentioned a cause of this could be that depressed children may not correctly interpret supportive behaviors from their parents. Sheeber and Sorensen predicted that the adolescents and the mothers would self-report a less encouraging surrounding while at home than would the healthy group of adolescents and mothers. The sample included 52 adolescent and mother duos, in which 26 of the adolescents met the requirement for unipolar affective disorder (major depression), while the other half were placed into a healthy control group. Adolescent participants were drafted from outpatient facilities. Each group consisted of 17 girls and 9 boys between the ages of 12 and 19 years old. Both the adolescents and the mothers completed the CES-D (a popular self-report measure) and an Issues Check/List (44 topics where mothers and teenagers disagree), which were both used to measure family conflict. Assessments were then done in the home and the laboratory by the researchers to match up the reports. In addition to a greater number of depressed adolescents self-reporting to living …show more content…
There was an idea that came from recent research that family functioning and interpersonal family conflicts contributed greatly to these behaviors, the researchers wanted to explore it. Past research has concluded that the suicidal adolescents view their families as generally being discouraging and are dissatisfied with their home environments (Pillay & Wassenaar, 1997). Pillay and Wassenaar’s study was done at a general state hospital whose patients were mainly of lower economic status. The participants were 40 Indian adolescents between the ages of 15 and 20 who had recently engaged in suicidal behaviors, such as cutting their wrist, overdosing on medication, attempting to hang themselves, etc. They participated in the study within 72 hours of their suicidal behavior. A control group of adolescents from the same hospital with no suicidal behaviors was pulled in for the study. Both groups were interviewed, rated their environment on the Family Satisfaction Scale, and were also given a checklist in order to identify certain stressors in their lives during the last 6 months, like a death in the family, relationship issues, difficulty in school, and others. These stressors were not rated on a scale, the researchers only marked whether they were present or not. The results support the idea that suicidal teenagers are “dissatisfied

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