Children and depression
Depression in children has never been taken too seriously, until around 2 decades ago. Younger depressed children will often pretend to be sick, refuse to go to school, stick to a parent or fear for a parent's death. Older depressed children will be moody, negative, will often get in trouble at school and feel misunderstood. Because childhood has more than one stages, each one of them manifested through different behaviors, it is a little harder for parents to establish a pattern and notice differences from the “normal” limits and distinguish a temporary phase from actual depression. However, if a parent notices or is noticed from school that his or her child had changed his behavior and is not being himself, should be taken to a doctor. If the child's pediatrician eliminates the physical symptoms, then a psychiatrist specialized in children treatments should be asked for an evaluation. For those cases that require treatment, a social worker or a psychologist will recommended for the therapy and the psychiatrist will only oversee it and interfere with medications if needed. The parent's concern will focus next on issues like whether the whole family should participate at therapy, what kind of therapy is it going to be, will the therapy require antidepressants and what are the side effects.
NIMH, the National Institute of Mental Health, considers that, depression treatments using medication, for children is an important area of research, thus, a network of seven centers where clinical research for the effects of medications for mental disorders can be conducted in children and adolescents was formed and got the support of NIMH. This network is called the Research Units on Pediatric Psychopharmacology (RUPPs). Among the medications researched by RUPPs, are the antidepressants. Some of those were proved to be efficient in treatments of depressed children. Yet, this kind of treatment requires a thoroughly monitoring from the child's physician.