Volumes of research show that since us humans are social animals, social support does a great job of helping us decrease depressive symptoms and live better lives. However, in recent years a psychologist called Dr. James A. Rankin used 428 undergraduate college students to do a research to examine the relationship between the level of social support received and depressive symptoms. His results indicated that the greater the discrepancy between needed support and received support, the more serious the depressive symptoms. Even though the sample used in this research pertains to college students, this research still leads me to think about the specific context of the social supports people in general receive since the type and quality of support can make the same amount of support offered more or less effective. The main types of support researchers examined thanks to Dr. Rankin’s research is family and peer support. Family support is defined as support one receives from his/her family members including relatives. Peer support is defined as support one receives from peers. Peers here mean people that are on the same level as an individual in terms of school, age, and grade. Peers include classmates and even close friends. (Rankin)
To provide one example of such research, Dr. Shahar and Dr. Henrich did a research on the relationship between perceived family and peer support and depressive symptoms in youths who underwent rocket attacks in the Israeli-Palestinian region. Dr. Shahar and Dr. Henrich assessed 362 Israeli adolescents (median age 14) by first rating these adolescents’ level of exposure to the trauma and then letting the adolescents fill out a questionnaire that measured the level and quality of social support their parents and peers are able to give them. After a period of time, these same adolescents were asked to complete other questionnaires that rated their levels of depressive symptoms such as depressed mood and fear, worry, and anxiety. The results show that while peer support, even when it involves close friends, produced very little to no changes to the levels of depressive symptoms in adolescents, specifically the symptoms of depressed mood, and fear, worry, and anxiety, family support showed to provide the adolescents in this study a constant buffering effect against not only the aforementioned depressive symptoms, but also general well-being and a marked reduction in externalizing symptoms like behavioral problems. Dr. Shahar and Dr. Henrich inferred from this study that while peers and friends might help in short term at times of acute stage of stress, support from more mature and authoritative figures like family might be necessary to produce a long-term impact on adolescents’ reactions and coping mechanisms to all the aforementioned stressors (Shahar).
To look more closely at the juxtaposition of family and peer support in relation to depressive symptoms, I present in this paper the research of Dr. Stice, Dr. Regan, and Dr. Randall conducted a research on 496 female adolescents enrolled in public and private middle schools. The age ranged from 11 to 15 years. These participants are interviewed in order for the researchers to find out the level of social support each of them feel like they received from peers and family in the dimensions of companionship, guidance, intimacy, affection, admiration, and reliable alliance from parents and peers. These girls were also screened for major depressive disorder and, if the criteria is not met, for various symptoms of depression, before the start of the research study and at the end of each interview. The results showed that deficits in parent support but not in peer support predicted increases in the amount of depressive symptoms as well as the onset and severity of major depression. Furthermore, this effect occurred when some research subjects are diagnosed with depression, suggesting that this effect should be generalized to clinical depressive psychopathology. Dr. Stice, Dr. Regan, and Dr. Randall inferred that because peers’ relationships change between acceptance and rejection so much, parents’ and families’ support provided greater stability. Moreover, just like it is mentioned in the previous research, parents might also be able to offer better quality support given their higher maturity levels compared to pears and their ability to draw on more life experience, and offer more practical and emotional support. Also, initial depressive symptoms and/or major depression is linked to decreases in the peer support adolescents felt they had. It could also be that the peers left the adolescents before they could form a close bond. Nonetheless, the fact that initial depressive symptoms and/or major depression is linked to decreases in the peer support adolescents felt they had but not in family support means that the behaviors of depressed people, for example excessive reassurance seeking, leads them to experience support erosion from others. In this research, these aforementioned behaviors of depressed people is associated with decreases in parental but not peer support. (Stice)
The next question to ask would be why people with depression often engages in the problematic excessive reassurance seeking behavior that is often a symptom of depression. The answer to this question is illuminated in Dr. Evraire and Dr. Dozois’s research on early core beliefs associated with excessive reassurance seeking in depression. (Evraire) Dr. Evraire and Dr. Dozois did a study using 303 undergraduate students enrolled in first-year psychology class. They were made to fill out the Beck Depression Inventory measuring their depression levels, the Depressive Interpersonal Relationships Inventory-Reassurance Seeking Subscale measuring their frequency in reassurance seeking behavior, the Experiences in Close Relationships-Revised (ECR-R) in measuring their levels of attachment anxiety and avoidance, and lastly Young Schema Questionnaire-Short Form which measures their levels of early negative and depressive cognitive schemas such as abandonment/instability, enmeshment, and shame which later on turned into depressive core beliefs. After filling out the questionaires, the participants will be asked to complete an online diagnostics tool to see whether they have major depressive disorder and/or symptoms of depression. The results showed that individuals are more likely to seek comfort and reassurance from others about the security of their supportive relationships when they have core beliefs from childhood pertaining to insecurity in relationships. Moreover, an abandonment/instability early schema as well as an avoidant attachment style perpetuated this reassurance seeking behavior which eventually contributed to depression and led people who have depression to be severely lacking in social support. The results of this study is actually proven by another more recent study on the adolescents in the outpatient mental health treatment setting. This study is done both on the adolescents who merely have clinical symptoms and those who are already diagnosed with clinical depression. (Evraire) The study on outpatient adolescents, done by Dr. Cumsille and Dr. Epstein, demonstrated that in the group of outpatient adolescents who are already diagnosed with clinical depression, adolescents with families who sought therapy for family problems or who reported that their family is less cohesive than the families of nonclinical outpatient adolescents, a relatively more cohesive family structure protects these adolescents from getting even more depressed. In the clinical sample, support from peers, except for male adolescents, were not associated with reduction/increase in depression. In nonclinical studies, however, support from peers readily compensated for deficits in family support. This research by Dr. Cumsille and Dr. Epstein supports the research done by Dr. Evraire and Dr. Dozois in the following ways. Firstly, the research by Dr. Cumsille and Dr. Epstein illustrates how family problems that originated early in an adolescent’s life not only contributed to an adolescent’s depression but also worsened the adolescent’s depression by reinforcing the depressive schemas of the adolescent, so much that even support from peers are either nonexistent or not enough to help the depressed adolescent. However, the nonnlincal adolescents who didn’t have these family and depressive schemas problems ended up finding social support even when their families might not be on their best at times in terms of supporting them. (Cumsille)
The last research study I will mention in this paper is done by Dr. McFarlane, Dr. Bellissimo, and Dr. Norman. Dr. McFarlane, Dr. Bellissimo. These psychologists recruited 1000 high school students from a high school in an area where there is an overrepresentation of low-class workers and immigrants, where barely any student had post-post-secondary education plans and where many students dropped out of high school. The psychologists thought that having samples of students from an area of high social dysfunction would be very good for their study on depression. After controlling for age, in this case 17 and younger and acquire command of English, the psychologists assess the adolescents on stress, social support from family and peers, social self-esteem (will be explained later), and level of depression (be it depressive symptoms or clinical depression) using interviews and surveys. The adolescents are assessed using the same methods half a year later. Results show that stress has the largest single correlation with the depression score. Social self-esteem as well as family support has a negative association with depression score. There is no significant correlation between peer support and depression score. There is also a positive correlation between peer support and social self-efficacy. These results show that social self-esteem, along with social support, act as support factors for depression. A significant source of social support is family support, which protects the adolescent through, for example, its connection with social self-efficacy. When healthy family relationships provide the adolescent with a positive and realistic self-concept as well as a healthy and comprehensive internal working models of social relationships, adolescent gains far greater cognitive and emotional resources than when he/she was a child as well as a greater tendency and ability to rely on external resources rather than his/her parents. Peer support then increases the adolescent’s social skills, which increases the adolescent’s social self-efficacy, defined as the adolescent’s confidence in their abilities to succeed in social tasks, overcome any social challenges, and thereby ultimately gain satisfying and supportive interpersonal relationships with others. This kind of self-efficacy, in turn, helps protect these adolescents from depression (either contracting clinical depression or worsening an existing depressive disorder).
While all the aforementioned research articles are great, the psychologists writing these articles and conducting does research about depression, social support, cognitive schemas, clinical depression versus merely depressive symptoms from their own theories and disciplines, there is not yet an effort or research to pull all these factors together, something that my research question for my research paper will hopefully achieve. My first research question is would family therapy be effective (or how effective family therapy will be) in treating adolescent’s depression? how and in what way would family therapy reduce adolescent’s depression? How will family therapy reduce the risk factors and enhance the promotive factors of adolescent depression? My second research question is would the relationship between peer support, family support as well as functioning, and depression be the same in adolescent nonclinical populations? In other words, how much would family dynamics play a role in the adolescent’s depressive symptoms, social support quantity/quality, in nonclinical populations compared to clinical populations? Would family dynamics affect the adolescent nonclinical populations in another way will be the other question to ask. Lastly, for family-based interventions to be effective in treating adolescent depression what components would the family-based interventions have to contain? My first hypothesis would be that based on previous research, family-based interventions will be very effective in treating adolescent depression; family-based interventions will do so by correcting the adolescent’s negative and depressive schemas as the adolescent begins to know the origins of these schemas in his/her family, also by fixing broken attachment styles like anxious and avoidant attachment style through bringing the family together and healing the family’s wounds. These effects of family-based interventions will, in a sense, reduce and even cure depression in adolescents because it will increase their self-efficacy, one of which is social self-efficacy as after family-based interventions they will be in a better place in their mindset, psychological health, schemas, and even in social skills to forge relationships with other people. Furthermore, with their schemas corrected and their subconscious wounds that their families and themselves suffered from and probably transferred to each other healed, the adolescents’ depressive symptoms will be much more relieved, the adolescents will be much happier and more able to reduce depression. My second hypothesis would be that although family dynamics wouldn’t matter as much in nonclinical population of adolescents considering their relatively better psychological health, their relatively intact schemas and social skills, and their relatively healthier families, adolescents will probably still need to have a healthy family dynamic because even the most normal and healthy peer relationships and mindsets and schemas would be subject to scrutiny and change since the changes in adolescence along with the shifts in the adolescents’ social circles would require a support figure that is more mature and lasting. Does family dynamics affect nonclinical adolescents differently yes, in a more preventative way. Thirdly, for family therapy to do the job I said it would in the hypothesis, the therapy has to focus on psychological, emotional, as well as concrete strategies in helping the depressed individual get better. The therapy has to pay special attention in the subconscious workings of each family member’s mind, focusing on each member’s experiences in the family as well as each members’ subconscious and early childhood experience to reduce transgenerational trauma if present. Lastly, there also needs to be sessions in which the family practice their new skills under the direction of the therapist. My study will be focused on both clinical and nonclinical adolescents from middle of middle school to early high school.