Are Preschoolers in St. Louis Depressed?

Aug 30, 2010 at 12:00 pm
click to enlarge Fingerpainting? What's the point. - flickr.com/photos/zaxl4
flickr.com/photos/zaxl4
Fingerpainting? What's the point.
They definitely can be, according to a 5,000-word story that just came out yesterday in The New York Times Magazine.

The main subject of the piece is a kid nicknamed "Kiran," who lives in "suburban St. Louis."

Here's an excerpt:
Today a number of child psychiatrists and developmental psychologists  say depression can surface in children as young as 2 or 3. "The idea is very threatening," says Joan Luby, a professor of child psychiatry  at Washington University School of Medicine, who gave Kiran his diagnosis and whose research on preschool depression has often met with resistance. "In my 20 years of research, it's been slowly eroding," Luby says of that resistance. "But some hard-core scientists still brush the idea off as mushy or psychobabble, and laypeople think the idea is ridiculous."