Interpretation of findings
DIKJ, depressive, depressed, depressive symptoms, depression
Relatively few trials have investigated the extent to which preventive interventions can significantly reduce the The fact that we observed an increase in symptom severity over time in the CG reflects the expected risk faced by offspring of depressed parents. This increased risk appears to be “buffered” in the EG, who showed no significant change in internalizing symptoms over time. According to traditional interpretations [In contrast to the increase in self-reported internalizing symptoms in the CG, we observed a number of positive outcomes for families allocated to the CG. They showed similar improvements to the EG in terms of children’s knowledge of depression and symptoms of depression. Furthermore, the parents in the CG showed similar improvements in their own depressive symptoms to parents in the EG. Given the fact that the sample had a relatively high socioeconomic status and very few children in the CG experienced mental illness across the study period, we believe the improvements in the CG may reflect the resources and psychological resilience and the young age (mean age < 11.59) of our particular sample. It is plausible that once allocated to the CG, these families were motivated to talk about depression within the family or to seek support elsewhere. The discrepancy in findings between changes in internalizing symptoms (YSR) versus depressive symptoms (DIKJ) is hard to interpret. We are somewhat cautious in interpreting the DIKJ values due to relatively poor convergent validity of this measure found in previous studies [A unique aspect of the study design was the inclusion of potentially We found no evidence that the positive effects of the intervention on internalizing symptoms were 