Research report The outcome of episodic versus persistent adolescent depression in young adulthood Hans-Christoph Steinhausen ⁎ , Claudia Haslimeier, Christa Winkler Metzke Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Zurich, Neumuensterallee 9, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland Received 21 November 2005; received in revised form 18 May 2006; accepted 22 May 2006 Available online 3 July 2006 Abstract Objective: Study of the impact of episodic and persistent depression on psychosocial and mental functioning of young adults. Methods: In a longitudinal representative community sample, four groups of subjects were identified who were depressed either in pre-adolescence, late adolescence or young adulthood or persistently depressed across time, and compared among each other and with a young adult control group. The 90th percentile on one or two self-reported symptom scales (i.e., the Center for Epidemiological Depression Scale (CES-D) or the Anxious/Depressed subscale of either the Youth Self-Report (YSR) or the Young Adult Self-Report (YASR)) served as the cut-off for the depression groups. Outcome was studied with regard to various psychosocial variables including life events, coping, self-related cognitions, size and efficiency of the social network, perceived parental behaviour, family relations and mental functioning. Results: For the large majority of psychosocial variables, the persistent depression group showed the most abnormal scores. The YASR profile of mental functioning at outcome of the persistent depression group was also clearly distinguishable by higher scores from all other groups on the majority of scales. On a few scales, the young adult episodic group was not significantly different from the persistent depression group. Conclusion: This study shows that persistent rather than episodic adolescent depression carries a risk for abnormal psychosocial and mental functioning in young adulthood. The study also reflects the burden of young adult depression. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Depression; Outcome; Adolescence; Adulthood 1. Introduction Various recent epidemiological studies have shown that depression in adolescence is quite common with prevalence figures for affective disorders ranging from 1.8% to 5.1% (Fleming et al., 1989; Lewinsohn et al., 1993; McGee et al., 1992; Roberts et al., 2000; Steinhausen and Winkler Metzke, 2003). In addition, a few longitudinal studies have provided insight into the course and persistence of both depressive symptoms (Garber et al., 1988; Nolen-Hoeksema et al., 1992) and depressive disorders (Lewinsohn et al., 1994, 1993) including a high rate of recurrence of depression and increased suicidality in young adulthood (Aalto-Setälä et al., 2002; Emslie et al., 1997; Lewinsohn et al., 1994; Weissman et al., 1999). Journal of Affective Disorders 96 (2006) 49 – 57 www.elsevier.com/locate/jad ⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +41 43 499 2730; fax: +41 43 499 2602. E-mail address: steinh@kjpd.unizh.ch (H.-C. Steinhausen). 0165-0327/$ - see front matter © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jad.2006.05.019