Depressions in Childhood and Adolescence

AMONG the many unresolved clinical and theoretical problems in medicine, the nature of depression is in the forefront. Childhood depressions are among the most conspicuous for lack of knowledge. It is perhaps a valid statement that this is one of the clinical conditions of childhood whose diagnosis is most widely missed and hence unreported. The subject is avoided to the extent that most textbooks of child psychiatry or childhood psychopathology either fail to mention it or make a cursory reference to it in connection with deprivation-type syndromes. In fact, the question whether children merely experience states of sadness or manifest.