Diagnosis of depression in school aged exceptional family member children: the children's depression inventory as a screening tool

To date, those children served by the Department of Defense's Exceptional Family Member Program (EFMP) have not been studied to better determine what may be their special needs in addition to those identified as impacting their abilities to succeed in school. This study investigated the utility of the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI) developed by Maria Kovacs (1979, 1981, 1983, 1985) as a screening tool for identifying depression in schoolaged (7-17) EFMP children.

Seventy-nine children and at least one of their parents who participated in the initial intake evaluations at two EFMP clinics in Karlsruhe and Mannheim, Germany, were included in this study. Each child was administered the CDI, a brief, 27-item multiple choice questionnaire (Kovacs, 1985). Subjects also completed a structured interview for depressive symptoms independently of his/her parents. The child's parents were interviewed using the same structured approach to determine their perceptions of their child's depressive symptomatology.