Building youths' resilience within a psychiatric outpatient setting: results from a pilot clinical intervention project.

The relevance of resilience research for clinical practice has not yet been established. In this intervention pilot study, the aim was to explore how group work based on enhancing the participants' creativity, self-efficacy, active coping, and sense of continuity could be utilized within a clinical context for adolescents with stressful background experiences. 31 participants and 24 parents completed pre-, post-, and 1-yr. follow-up assessments of the youths' behavior difficulties, as well as depression, positive life attitude, coping, and prosocial behavior. Apart from a drop in self-rated prosocial behavior, no significant treatment effects were found. Implications for clinical practice and research are indicated.

The role of stressful life events in the development of depressive symptoms in adolescence--a longitudinal community study.

Depressive symptoms were measured in a cohort of community-based adolescents (n = 163) at two time-points, with 1 year intervening. At Time 2, participants also answered a scale about past-year stressful life events. Depressive symptoms increased from Time 1 to Time 2, the effect being stronger for girls than for boys. Depressive symptoms were significantly correlated with concurrent measures of recent stressful life events, but this relationship disappeared after controlling for previous depressive symptoms. Rather, previous level of depressive symptoms predicted stressful life events. This demonstrates that a unidirectional model of stressful life events as the cause of depressive symptoms in adolescents is too simplistic.