| Abstract: |
Depression appears to the most common of all psychiatric disorders everywhere, accounting for 75% of all psychiatric hospilalizations worldwide (Gotlib and Hammen, 1992). Each year million people over the world develop clinically recognizable symptoms of depression. The incidence of depression seems to be nearly ten times greater than of schizophrenia. Furthermore, during the course of a lifetime, it is estimated that 25% of the general population in the United States will experience at least one debilitating episode of depression (Gotlib and Hammen, 1992).There has been a recent incics, in interest in childhood depression (Cantwell and Carlson, 1979), but research on children is still at the preliminary stage of mostly descriptive studies (Messer and Gross, 1995). An increasing number of researchers and clinicians agree with Rutter’s (Kashani et al., 1981) statement, however, that ”answers to the problems posed on childhood depression would shed important light both on the origins of adult depressive illness and on the nature of psychiatric disorders in childhood”.Locus of control refers to the degree to which individuals believe they can influence the outcome of important events in their lives. Internals( i.e., people with an internal locus of control. Rather, events happen as they de because of fate, Luck, chance, or powerful other people - but not because of themselves.Relatively few studies have examined the relationship between social support or locus of control and depressive symptoms in chidren. Fewer still have explored the role of social support or locus of control as buffer, and none has so far examined the role of control in conjunction with social support.
|
|
|