Depression seems to be a big media topic lately, and not just the economic kind. The New York Times Magazine in May featured a front page article by Daphne Merkin entitled: “A Long Journey in the Dark: My Life with Chronic Depression. The Today show just featured a segment on anti-depressants. And now comes a new study reminding us that pre-schoolers also get depressed.
Dr. Joan Luby of the Washington University School of Medicine found that depression among preschoolers is a real disorder, and that preschoolers with depression were four times as likely to develop a major depressive order.
“Our study is the first available, to our knowledge, to follow-up and describe the 2-year course of preschool major depressive disorder in a large systematically assessed sample,” Luby was widely quoted as saying. The study, published in n the latest issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, got a lot of play and made for some alarming headlines.
EarlyStories would like to see some follow-up. The study, for example, did not examine how depression is treated in children, or address any controversy about medication. It said little about what course of action teachers should take when they see children who exhibit symptoms of depression.
At least one article about the study voiced some skepticism: University of Massachusetts psychologist Lisa Cosgrove said she is skeptical about the accuracy of labeling preschoolers as depressed, because diagnostic tools for evaluating mental health in children so young aren’t as well tested as those used for adults.
Hechinger blogs
Tough love (but it’s really frustration)
A summer ‘bridge’ to collegeSiobhan Curious, who teaches at Quebec’s version of community college, was having a lousy day even before a failing student walked in to make it worse. Kalia had failed the same class in the autumn because she didn’t come to class. After skipping the first two weeks of her second try, she came to the office [...]
Chicago will subsidize jobs for City Colleges gradsFor students with weak academic skills, a summer “bridge” to college-level classes can improve the odds of success, reports Education Week. “Summer bridge programs can provide an important head start on college,” said Elisabeth Barnett, a senior research associate at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Community College Research Center in New York. “They can increase [...]
After college, what will you earn?Chicago will give $2 million to companies that hire City Colleges graduates, reports the Chicago Sun-Times. “You hire one of our community college kids, we’ll pay their stipend for the first four weeks of work,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a commencement speech for the system’s graduates. “I want the rest of the country and [...]
What value-added models can—and can’t—tell us about teaching and learningIf college is an investment, students should have some idea what they’ll earn with a degree in nursing or marketing or whatever from College X vs. College Y, writes Daniel de Vise in College, Inc. Soon more information will be available about post-college employment. Especially as college continues to get more expensive, students rightfully want to [...]
The worst eighth-grade math teacher in New York CityGetting your middle-schooler in front of a high-quality teacher for even one year will improve his or her chances of going to college and earning a good salary later in life, according to a recent study. The study’s authors used value-added modeling—predicting how well a given student will do on a standardized test, controlling for [...]
For 10 months, Carolyn Abbott waited for the other shoe to drop. In April 2011, Abbott, who teaches mathematics to seventh- and eighth-graders at the Anderson School, a citywide gifted-and-talented school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, received some startling news. Her score on the Teacher Data Report, the New York City Department of [...]