ildren, has no one face, children may display an array of seemingly contradictory symptoms. They may be quiet, lethargic, and withdrawn, or irritable, belligerent, and angry.
             Depression in children is notoriously difficult to diagnose for many reasons. Not for the reasons we use the word depression. For example when we gain five pounds and can't lose them and when we fail to get the job we want. But clinical depression is a constellation of symptoms that occurs over a specific period of time and has a definite start, duration, and ending. This period of time impairs a child in some profound way. Further compounding the difficulty is the fact that depressed kids often struggle with other problems such as anxiety, eating or conduct disorders, learning disabilities, or bipolar depressive disorder.
             Still, for parents the diagnosis is a harsh blow, and they may continue to deny it out of guilt and fear. In fact, depression is not only no one's fault, it's highly treatable, the sooner the better. Doctors now use a combination of psychotherapies including play, behavior, and cognitive therapy in individual or family counseling, as well as, medication to help depressed kids regain control of their own lives.
             Why one child is emotionally resilient and the other buckles under the first setback, is due to a combination of factors. Some are genetic and some are environmental. According to Erik Erikson, a psychoanalyst, he would have said that depression can triggered in any of his eight stages because, through each stage a person goes through a developmental crisis, which is central to that stage of life and must be resolved. Learning theorists would have focused primarily on the nurture aspects of life. These theorists include, Watson, Pavlov, and Skinner, and they focused on the ways we learn specific behaviors. They would have supported the idea that depression is caused in a child as a result of learnin...