Abstract
The main objective of this study was to examine the association between four types of adverse life events (family environment, separation, social adversity, and death) and the development of depressive symptoms among Puerto Rican youth. This was a secondary analysis using three waves (2000–2004) of interview data from the Boricua Youth Study of 10–13 year old Puerto Rican youth residing in New York and Puerto Rico with no depressive symptoms at baseline (n = 977). Depressive symptoms increased with an increase in social adversity, separation, death, and death events. Youth support from parents was a significant protective factor for all adverse events and parent coping was a protective factor in social adversity events. Relying on standard diagnostic tools is ideal to identify youth meeting the criteria for a diagnosis of depression but not useful to detect youth who present with subclinical levels of depression. Youth with sub-clinical levels of depression will not get treated and are at increased risk of developing depression later in life. Adverse life events are potentially relevant to use in conjunction with other screening tools to identify Puerto Rican youth who have subclinical depression and are at risk of developing depression in later adolescence.
Highlights
Depression is a rare psychiatric disorder in childhood but becomes one of the most common disorders in adolescence [1] with trajectories during this transition that are still not well understood [2]
We found that the association between types of events and depressive symptoms varies in strength suggesting that life events have different impacts
This study shows that certain types of life events are more strongly associated with the development of depressive symptoms possibly highlighting a stress-sensitization effect that results in more depressive reactions [99]
Summary
Depression is a rare psychiatric disorder in childhood but becomes one of the most common disorders in adolescence [1] with trajectories during this transition that are still not well understood [2]. Research on Latino youth mental health remains relatively rare [3], and little is known about youth depression among Latino subgroups [4]. Our interest in Latino youth was fueled by the rapid increase of Latinos younger than 18 in the U.S between 1993 and 2013 (107% compared to 11% for the general population) [5]. We focused on Puerto Ricans who are the second largest group of Latinos living in the U.S (4.6 million), representing 9% of the Latino population [6]. Puerto Ricans are more likely to possess social characteristics that have been shown to threaten family stability, and place youth at an increased risk for developing.
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