Epidemiology of Mood and Anxiety Disorders in Children and Adolescents

Although researchers in the early and mid-1900s either denied the existence of depression during childhood Rie, 1966 or believed that depression in children Ž . was masked by behaviors related to other childhood conditions e.g., conduct Ž disorder; Glaser, 1967 , the existence of depression and other affective disorders in . both children and adolescents has now been widely demonstrated in research and clinical settings Rutter et al., 1970; Poznanski et al., 1976; Carlson, 1990 . Since Ž . the early 1980s, hundreds of papers have been published on the phenomenology, assessment, magnitude, risk factors, and consequences of affective disorders first experienced in childhood and adolescence. Moreover, knowledge of the widely recognized biases of clinical samples of children has led to a substantial body of research in children selected from nonclinical samples. This chapter focuses on this body of work