Longitudinal assessment of major depression and anxiety disorders in children

Two-year recall and mother-child agreement with respect to a child's DSM-III lifetime diagnoses of major depression and anxiety disorder, based on K-SADS-E interviews with children, were assessed for a sample of 59 children, 6 to 16 years of age, at high and low risk for depression. The mothers had excellent recall and the children had good recall of a child's major depression. Both mothers and children had poor recall of a child's anxiety disorder. Mother-child agreement on major depression in children improved at the 2-year follow-up. A comparison of diagnoses based on mother and child reports with the psychiatrists' best estimate diagnoses of major depression suggested that children were more informative than mothers at the initial interview. The children were slightly less informative than the mothers at follow-up. These findings underscore the importance of multiple informants and longitudinal assessment in research on childhood psychiatric disorder.