Items Tagged With childhood depression

Sometime in the mid-1990s my mother uncovered some photos of me as a child that I'd never seen before. I flipped through them and found one that fascinated me. It showed me at about nine months or so, crawling on the grass in Golden Gate Park. My tongue was sticking out of a corner of my mouth, and my chubby little face was beaming. I looked like I was having a great time.

I finally figured out, after a few days, what was so compelling about the picture. I had never seen a picture of myself as a child in which I had anything stronger than a half-smile on my face. In most photos I had a pensive expression on my face. School photos were the exception. In those I, always the good girl, obliged with a wide, if false, smile. So seeing a childhood photo in which I was genuinely beaming was new to me.

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I had untreated clinical depression starting from a young age. When I was finally diagnosed at age 27, I started trying to figure out why this had happened to me.

Why would a child suffer from depression? What are the factors that can combine to create depression in a young child? In many cases, one of the usual suspects is a family history of mental illness. But there was no such history on either side of my family. So I started looking for other explanations.

What I found was very interesting to me, as a few of the risk factors had been present in my life before my depression.

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