Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.
Today's article talks about the different views students, teachers, and parents have of school children in regards to skill deficits and depression. I was pleasantly surprised to see the the professor overseeing the study suggesting that simply asking the kids was the best possible indicator for depression. In my experience parents, teachers, and adults at large assume kids are stupid and don't know anything, and thus their opinions can't be trusted. I have a marked opinion otherwise, frankly, because kids are simply little, somewhat inexperienced humans. Not being fully developed and not having 20+ years of life experience doesn't particularly make someone stupid, in my opinion.
It didn't, however, surprise me that teachers and parents tended to miss that a child was depressed. Teachers often have to handle classes of 20+, even 30+ students at a time, and depression sometimes only looks like a shy or quiet child. It's the noisy, misbehaving children that tend to get the attention, so the depression is easy to miss... and it was missed, when I was growing up. It's maybe a bit less understandable for parents, in my opinion, but of course my own situation, growing up, included a very very busy father, and a mother with her own form of deep depression. Circumstances, therefore, were not exactly ideal for recognizing either my autism or my growing depression and anxiety. In today's hectic US society, that is probably more and more the case.
The article itself sparked a question, which I'll pose to you now: did the depression cause the skill deficits, or did the skill deficits cause the depression?
In truth, I don't know the answer, and there may not be a broad, generalized answer for it anyway. But it's very much the case that children can get anxious and depressed when they can see they're not keeping up with their peers, or with expectations set on them by others. This isn't just autistic children, but you can often see it in autistic children because we don't have the full social intuition that's expected of us. Our social learning doesn't necessarily keep up with the demands of school, especially once puberty hits and things get extremely complicated. So there's reason enough to assume skill deficits can cause depression.
But then, too, depression can absolutely cause skill deficits. If a child is depressed for reasons besides lacking skills, such as having a parent in prison, or suffering a form of abuse, that affects how much attention, enthusiasm, and patience a child can put into learning social skills, and even reading and mathematics. A child struggling at home, essentially, may also struggle in school... and eventually, the lack of full attention, enthusiasm, and patience will take a toll on how much the child learns. In school, some subjects rely on the student fully understanding the previous subjects, so performance would degrade over time.
I was alarmed to see that 30% of the 643 elementary students in the study reported mild to severe depression. That's almost a third, which is nearly the same as the depression levels reported for the general population in a study a couple weeks ago. That's really really bad! And this was early elementary school, before puberty makes things way more complicated.
No comments:
Post a Comment