Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Dr. Jeanine Webber: My name is Dr. Jeanine Webber, and I'm a professor
and the program co-ordinator for the Bachelor of Applied Arts & Criminal Justice here at
Humber College.
A research project I worked on a few years ago was about girls who have behaviour disorders
as well as depression. I was working on a program review that was designed to help girls
with behavioural problems change their behaviour in a way that would help them succeed at school,
have more friends. And as I was interviewing the girls, I started to notice that there
were a lot that not only had behavioural problems, but really had a lot of symptoms related to
depression and anxiety, and this concerned me because the program we were putting them
in was only designed to deal with behavioural problems. I did not notice any real meaningful
change in their depression -- now that was my impression -- that was not scientific at
that point. So I started to say, hmm, I wonder if there's something else we should be doing
for this groups of girls, and these families to support them. So I went to the literature
to try to see if there was any guidance. There certainly was a lot of information about how
girls are less likely to have behavioural problems but when they do have behavioural
problems, they're much more likely to have other mental health issues which are commonly
called co-morbid or co-occurring disorders, then boys who have behavioural problems. And
so because the majority of the research has been very focused on boys, there was very
little focus on girls; and, yet, they tend to have more complicated treatment needs.
The literature did tell me that there were more serious consequences for girls with co-morbid
disorder, so they were able to follow girls who had co-morbid disorders into adulthood,
and they could say there was much higher rates of suicide, higher rates of substance abuse,
higher rates of severe mental health problems, so I knew that there was a real urgency. I
took a look at the data, and what I did was, I compared girls at intake who only had behvaioural
problems, and girls who had both depressive and behavioural problems. And what I was able
to do, I was able to -- even though the sample was small -- was to tease out a little bit
of what were the differences between them at intake. The girls with co-morbid disorders
were much higher in the level of severity of problems that they were experiencing, which
makes sense. The other thing we found, which was very consistent with the literature, was
that the girls had a history of abuse. So the girls that were co-morbid at the time
of intake were more likely to have experienced some form of abuse. The sample was too small
for me to tease out what type of abuse might have been more of a predictor than others,
but it certainly helped us, at the agency, be able to know that whenever we have a girl
that comes in with any history of abuse, we need to take a look and see if there's any
depressive symptoms. So that was one contribution that that study was able to do in terms of
filling in the gap that was in the literature of what's not known.