Is your teen suffering from depression? Study offers insights on how to help them

Adolescents with depression are more sensitive to parental criticism and less sensitive to parental praise, compared to healthy adolescents without depression, according to a recent study published in Psychological Medicine. The impact was determined through measurements of heightened brain activity and self-reported ratings of mood.

Adolescent or teen depression is a serious mental health concern which is also quite common. The child ends up having a low sense of self. While there can be many possible causes for adolescent depression, negative interactions between parents and adolescents have been linked to the development of this depression.

Lisanne van Houtum from Leiden University in the Netherlands alongside her colleagues investigated the emotional and brain responses of adolescents with depression to feedback from parents – both negative and positive feedback.

“The researchers recruited 20 Dutch adolescents who were aged 13.5 to 18 diagnosed with either dysthymia (a mild, chronic form of depression) or major depressive disorder (a severe, acute form of depression). 59 healthy adolescents aged 12 to 18 without depression were also recruited. For both groups, the adolescents’ parents were also invited to join the study,” according to PsyPost.

Before beginning the task, the adolescents were falsely informed that their mother or father would choose both positive and negative feedback words they found best described the adolescent’s personality. Each feedback word was prefaced with ‘Your mother/father thinks you are…”.

After viewing each feedback word, the adolescents reported their mood. Following this task, outside of the MRI scanner the adolescents were asked to freely recall as many of the feedback words as they could in 2 minutes.

The researchers discovered that both depressed adolescents and healthy adolescents experienced a decrease in mood after criticism and an increase in mood after praise, compared to neutral feedback. However, the degree of mood increase following praise was blunted in depressed adolescents compared to healthy adolescents.

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Van Houtum is hopeful that parental involvement could potentially aid in treatment: “Identifying personality characteristics adolescents value about themselves may be key to improving their depressed mood… parents could be taught to identify and acknowledge these valued characteristics of the child, and in doing so support the development of a positive self-view.”

“Adolescents with depression are especially sensitive to parental criticism: they view themselves already negative, and rely less on their self-views when confronted with parental criticism,” Van Houtum suggests.