ABSTRACT
Both personal and contextual factors may pre-dispose youngsters to developing depression. A genetic vulnerability as indexed by a family history of mood disorders, early loss experiences, exposure to non-optimal parenting experiences and parental depression are among the more important predisposing risk factors for mood disorders. Loss experiences may include health-related losses, such as difficulties associated with pre-or peri-natal complications and early illness or injury. Psychosocial losses may include bereavements, separations, institutional care, social disadvantage and loss of trusting relationships through abuse. A punitive, critical and authoritarian non-optimal parenting style, where the parent focuses on the child’s failures rather than his or her successes, may render the child vulnerable to depression. The child, as a result of such parenting, may be sensitized to failure experiences and threats to his or her autonomy. Neglectful parenting, on the other hand, may sensitize the child to loss of relationships and threats of abandonment. Neither of these types of parenting fosters secure attachment and the development of secure internal working models for trusting intimate relationships. Parental depression or drug or alcohol abuse may sub-serve these problematic parenting styles. Marital discord and family disorganization may also create a context where these types of non-optimal parenting occur. Personal characteristics of the adolescent, such as low intelligence, difficult or inhibited temperament, low self-esteem and an external locus of control, may pre-dispose adolescents to developing depression. Low intelligence may be associated with failure to achieve valued academic goals. Difficult or inhibited temperament may compromise the youngster’s capacity to regulate mood and this in turn may interfere with the development of supportive relationships. Negative self-evaluative beliefs and the belief that important sources of reinforcement are beyond personal control may render youngsters vulnerable to self-criticism and helplessness which are part of the depressive experience.
