Most children who lose a parent don’t experience depression, a new study finds. Researchers studied children 5 to 18 over two years who suffered the loss of one parent but had a surviving parent and compared them to children who had not lost a parent. They found that about half the children experienced major depressive disorder two months after the death of their parent, and an additional 25 percent had a milder type of depression. But those numbers dropped by about half over the next few months. Two years after a death, 5 percent of children who lost a parent had a major depressive disorder and 11 percent had a milder type of depression. (Los Angeles Times, 5/17/11)
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