Beliefs About the Causes and Permanence of Depression in High-Symptom Adolescents: Correlates, Parent-Child Agreement, and Stability Over Time

Abstract

Abstract Beliefs about the cause and timeline of depression inform how people manage depression and predict clinical outcomes. However, more research is needed to understand the relationship between these variables, especially among adolescents. We assessed causal and timeline beliefs in a sample of N = 106 adolescents with elevated depression symptoms and their parents. Adolescents varied substantially in their endorsement of biological and external causes for depression, as well as in their beliefs about the timeline of depression. In contrast to prior research, we found that adolescents who held stronger biological causal beliefs also held stronger external causal beliefs (r = .39, p = .005). Moreover, neither causal beliefs were strongly linked with pessimistic timeline beliefs. Beliefs showed moderate stability across time, and adolescents’ beliefs did not correlate with those of their parents. We conclude that adolescents with elevated depression symptoms do not hold biological causal beliefs at the expense of other explanations.