Editorial: Toward More Individualized Treatment of Pediatric Depression

For decades, antidepressant trials in children and adolescents have been designed to answer the question: does the medication, on average, work better than placebo? As clinicians, however, we confront a different challenge. We do not treat "average" patients. We treat individual children and adolescents who differ in their symptoms, developmental stage, family environment, treatment history, and ultimately their response to treatment. Families rarely ask whether an antidepressant works on average. Rather, they ask whether it is likely to help their own child and what they should expect during the course of treatment.