Course Overview

This free, CME-certified webinar provides clear tools to help you effectively screen for and treat pediatric depression. Depression can be diagnosed in up to 8% of adolescents and 2% of children. It can be reliably diagnosed in children and adolescents and there are treatments available.

Failure to diagnose and treat depression can lead to significant morbidity and mortality with increasing suicide rates in the population of adolescents who are depressed. Further, bipolar disorder in children and adolescents frequently presents first as depression, making the detection of depression and mania a particularly important thing to assess and manage. This webinar will describe the presenting problems, discuss comorbidities that are common, and provide a treatment algorithm that can be used.

This webinar is presented by Project TEACH, a program funded by the New York State Office of Mental Health.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this program participants will be able:

• To review the risks and benefits of treatment of depression in children and adolescents
• To describe the phenomenology of depression in children and adolescents
• To discuss the presentation of depression as it relates to the diagnosis of and progression to bipolar disorder in childhood and adolescence.
• To discuss the management of depression in children and adolescents