Teachers' assessments of prepubertal childhood depression

Abstract

Teachers' reports of depression and behaviour problems were investigated in Australian prepubertal children aged 7-11 years. Teacher ratings of children in three groups were compared. The clinical depressed and clinical nondepruscd children w m outpatients at a Melbourne metropolitan hospital and the normal children w e n matched with the clinical children for age, sex, family s t~c t u r c , and socioecc~ nomic status. Measures included the Childmu Depression Scale -Adult Short Form and the Children's Behaviour Questionnaire far Completion by Teachers. The mults showed that teachen of children in the clinical depressed group (n = 20) reported higher levels of depression and more behaviour problems than teachers of children in the clinical noridepressed (n = 81) and normal (n = 52) groups. The findings support the capacity of teachers to identify depression in children, and suggest that depmsion and behaviour problems are associated in prepubertal children.Children spend a lot of their time in school. so it is natural to assume that teachers will be a good source of information about them. Evidence concerning the validity of teachers' assessment of children is controversial. Weintraub. Winters, and Neale (1986) note that:

A wait-list controlled pilot study of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) for children with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms from motor vehicle accidents

“…Various secondary and process measures (Subjective Units of Disturbance; Wolpe, 1982; and Validity of Cognition scales; Shapiro, 1989) were taken to corroborate any improvements in trauma-specific symptoms and to determine whether such improvements generalised to non-trauma symptoms such as anxiety (State Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children; Spielberger, 1973;Hedl & Papay, 1982;Papay & Speilberger, 1986), depression (Children's Depression Scale; Lang & Tisher, 1983;Tisher, Lang-Takac & Lang 1992;Tisher, 1995) and behavioural problems (Child Behaviour Checklist; Achenbach, 1991;Saxe et al, 2003;Vila et al, 2001). Parent measures included known correlates of childhood PTSD that were likely to impact upon recovery (Langeland & Olff, 2008) (the Child Post-Traumatic Stress -Reaction Index: Parent Questionnaire (henceforth referred to as the Parent PTS-RI), Nader, 1994;General Health Questionnaire -12, Goldberg, 1978; the Impact of Events Scale, Horowitz, Wilner, & Alvarez, 1979; the General Functioning Scale derived from the Family Assessment Device; Epstein, Baldwin & Bishop, 1983; and a checklist of social stressors).…”

A systematic review of effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of school-based identification of children and young people at risk of, or currently experiencing mental health difficulties

“…(1) Universal screening programmes Eight studies of universal screening programmes reported on rates of identification (Tisher, 1995;Jones et al, 2002;Gould et al, 2009;Robinson et al, 2010;Husky et al, 2011;Morey et al, 2015;Hilt et al, 2018). In six studies, positive screening results were verified by subsequent clinical interview conducted by MH professionals (Gould et al, 2009;Robinson et al, 2010;Husky et al, 2011;Morey et al, 2015;Hilt et al, 2018), or an existing diagnosis of MHD (Tisher, 1995), giving a reliable rate of false positives.…”

Evaluación de un programa universal de prevención de la depresión en niños y niñas de educación primaria

“…Scale-Teacher. (Lang y Tisher, 2004;Tisher, 1995) Total Depresivo Total Positivo 10 ítems extraídos de la escala original CDS. El profesor debe valorar respecto a cada estudiante el grado de acuerdo con las afirmaciones en una escala de 1 a 5 (1=muy en desacuerdo a 5=muy de acuerdo).…”