Individual differences in the course of youth depression: The importance of renitence and reversion

Studies of developmental trajectories of depression are important for understanding its etiology. Existing studies have been limited by short time frames and no studies have explored a key factor: differential patterns of responding to life events. This paper introduces a novel analytic technique, growth mixture modeling with structured residuals, to examine the course of youth depression symptoms in a large, prospective cohort (N=11,641, ages 4-16.5). Age-specific critical points were identified at ages 10 and 13 where depression symptoms spiked for a minority of children. However, most depression risk was due to dynamic responses to environmental events, drawn not from a small pool of persistently depressed children, but a larger pool of children who varied across higher and lower symptom levels.