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 Understanding that current or recent depression raises dropout risk
may encourage schools to put a higher priority on mental health
services, the study team writes in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
“This is the first study of its kind to look at depression symptoms
in the year before dropout,” lead author Dr. Veronique Dupere,
associate professor at the school of psycho-education at the
University of Montreal, told Reuters Health by phone.
“The role of depression in deciding to drop out was underestimated
in previous studies because the timing was not properly considered.
Depression is not stable. It tends to come and go,” she said.
For the new analysis, researchers asked 6,773 students in 12
disadvantaged high schools with high dropout rates in and around
Montreal to complete a screening questionnaire at the beginning of
the school year. The brief assessment, conducted from 2012 to 2015,
measured students’ risk for dropout, and also asked for their
sociodemographic information and their family’s employment,
education and structure.
During a second round of interviews one year later, a subset of
students were asked to participate in face-to-face meetings with a
graduate student who assessed their mental health.
Students who dropped out of school in the year following their
initial screening were also assessed for their mental health.
Researchers compared these students to a similar group, also in the
program, who didn’t drop out.
Almost a quarter of the 183 adolescents who dropped out of school
had clinically significant depression in the few months before
quitting, researchers found.
Dupere said rates of conduct disorders and
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were higher among
the dropouts and the matched at-risk peers than among the average
students. But ADHD was not a factor significantly distinguishing
dropouts and matched at-risk students, although conduct disorder
might be.
In 2015, an estimated three million adolescents aged 12 to 17 in the
U.S. had experienced at least one major depressive episode in the
past year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. For
many individuals, major depression can end up limiting their ability
to carry out major life activities.
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“School dropout portends other bad outcomes, like the inability to
gain employment, involvement in substance abuse and problems with
the juvenile justice system,” said Dr. Laura Mufson of Columbia
University Medical Center in New York City, who wasn’t involved in
the study.
More than one in eight young people ages 16 to 24 are neither
working nor in school, according to the Social Science Research
Council’s Measure of America project. That estimate is based on data
from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2013 American Community Survey.
“I’m excited about the study because we need data like this,” Dr.
Tamar Mendelson of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public
Health in Baltimore, Maryland, told Reuters Health by phone.
“I think the problem of school dropout is really critical,” said
Mendelson, who wasn’t involved in the new study. “Depression and
other mental health issues can sometimes fall through the cracks.
Administrators may not understand all the issues and the best course
to take. Data like this is helpful in highlighting the risks
associated between depression and school dropout.”
One limitation of the study is that a lot of teenagers have anxiety
along with depression, Mufson noted.
“The researchers looked at ADHD and conduct disorders. They left out
anxiety and it’s highly linked to school dropout,” she said in a
phone interview.
Dupere emphasized that no cause-and-effect conclusions can be drawn
from her research. “I believe studies like the one we did should be
replicated in other places, as well, to see if the results are the
same.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2yOMkk4 Journal of Adolescent Health, online
November 28, 2017.
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