Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) in Children
Did you know that children can suffer from SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder)? I’m embarrassed to admit that I just found this out recently, after years of writing about mental health. Seasonal Affective Disorder is a condition that can cause depression, fatigue and overeating, among other things, and it is…
Is Your Child Depressed? All About Childhood Depression
A few years ago, my mother unearthed some pictures of me as a baby which I had never seen before. One showed me at about eight months old, crawling on the grass of Golden Gate Park. I was looking directly at the camera, my tongue sticking out of the…
4 Reasons Depression is Hard to Spot in a Child
Most of my childhood was blighted by clinical depression. After I was diagnosed at age 27, my parents told me that they knew something was wrong but didn’t know what. Not surprising, since I grew up in the 1960s and 70s, and depression in children wasn’t even considered a…
10 Ways to Help When Your Child is Depressed
Being a parent is rewarding, but tough. One of the hardest things to deal with is your child’s pain. If your child is depressed, you probably are scared and feel helpless. Even I, with years of writing about and researching depression, have felt this way in the face of…
What are the Risk Factors for Childhood Depression?
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…
Diagnosing and Treating Dysthymia in Children: When Depression is Chronic at an Early Age
When I was finally diagnosed with depression at age 27, after twenty years of suffering from one type of depressive disorder or another, it was because I was going through a major depression at that particular time. It was only the third major depression I had experienced, and all…
Bullying and Ostracizing Tied to Depression and Anxiety in Special Needs Children
Children with special needs have always been a favorite target for bullying and teasing. It’s easy to see why – they’re different. Being different is generally not seen as a good thing when you’re a child in elementary or middle school. Except for the occasional rebel, most children don’t…