Perceived Stigma and Depression among Black Adolescents in Outpatient Treatment

Despite the high prevalence of depression among children and adolescents, most that need mental health treatment do not seek care. This is especially true for ethnic minority adolescents. Prior research has shown that perceived stigma may act as a barrier to the initiation of and adherence to depression treatment, yet few studies have examined the relationship between stigma and depression among Black adolescents. This exploratory study examined the relationship between Black adolescents' depression severity and their current level of perceived stigma in an outpatient sample. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with a clinical sample of adolescents referred for mental health services at a community-based outpatient clinic (n =108), participating in a prospective pilot study on adolescents' patterns of mental health service use. The analyses revealed that greater depression severity was significantly associated with higher perceived stigma (p < .05), particularly among females. The results also suggest that Black adolescents appear to exhibit an appropriate level of self-assessment regarding their need for mental health services. These results are interpreted in relation to previous literature, and limitations and directions for future research are discussed.     

State and revolution

Conclusion Our brief examination of the conditions underlying the political crises of the Meiji Restoration and the Prussian Reform Movement has tended to reinforce by contrast our central arguments about the causes of revolutionary political crises in France, Russia, and China. Bourbon France, Hohenzollern Prussia, Tokugawa Japan, Manchu China, and Romanov Russia - all became subject to military pressures from more economically developed nations abroad and all experienced in response societal political crises. Yet only France, Russia, and China were plunged into the upheavals of social revolution, while Prussia and Japan, relatively speaking, adapted speedily and smoothly to international exigencies through reforms instituted from above by autocratic political authorities. The different fates of these agrarian monarchical regimes faced with the challenges of adapting to the exigencies of international uneven development can be explained in large part by looking at the ways in which agrarian relations of production and landed dominant classes impinged upon state organizations - though it is also important to assess the severity of the pressures from abroad with which each regime had to cope.In Russia, the revolutionary crisis of autocratic rule and dominant class privilege was due to the overwhelming stress of World War I upon an early-industrializing economy fettered by a backward agrarian sector. The Imperial regime was strong enough to override dominant class interests and enforce modernizing reforms after the shock of defeat in the Crimean War, but it was not able to reorganize agrarian class relations that were inimical to modern economic development or rapid increases in productivity. Even extraordinary successes of state-propelled industrialization were not enough to allow TsaristRussia to make up her economic lag behind the West, and she remained entangled within the European states system as it careened toward World War. By contrast, neither Japan nor Prussia was so agriculturally backward or internationally pressed during early industrialization as Tsarist Russia.Both Bourbon France and Manchu China had fairly prosperous agrarian economies and experienced foreign pressures no greater than those experienced by Tokugawa Japan and Hohenzollern Prussia. Another pattern is the differentiating cause here: specifically, the presence or absence of a landed upper class with insitutionalized political leverage at extralocal levels, over against fiscal and military policing functions centrally organized by royal administrations. If such politically organized and administratively entrenched landed classes were present, as they were in France and China, then the reactions of these classes against autocratic attempts to institute modernizing reforms deposed the monarchies and precipitated breakdowns of administrative and military organizations. This meant that externally induced political crises developed into potentially social-revolutionary situations. But if, as in Japan and Prussia, politically powerful landed classes were absent, so that the oldregime states were more highly bureaucratic, then foreign-induced crises could be resolved through political struggles confined, broadly speaking, within the established governing elite and administrative arrangements. And this precluded the possibility for social revolution from below.Social revolutions in France, Russia, and China were launched, it has been argued here, by crises centered in the structures and situations of the states of the Old Regimes. Still, the actual occurrence of social revolutions in these three countries depended not only upon the emergence of revolutionary political crises, but also upon the conduciveness of the agrarian sociopolitical structures of the Old Regimes to peasant revolts. To go on with the analysis from here, therefore, we would have to reexamine the prerevolutionary societies from the opposite perspective, no longer from the top down with emphasis on the state, the dominant class, and the international context, but from the bottom up with emphasis on the structural situation of the peasants in the agrarian economy and in local political and class relations. While this task cannot be accomplished here, it is undertaken in the larger study of which this analysis is only a part.     

Ethnic‐racial Socialization,Perceived Neighborhood Quality,and Psychosocial Adjustment among African American and Caribbean Black Adolescents

Ethnic–racial socialization is employed by ethnic minority parents to support their children’s psychosocial adjustment. These socialization messages may be associated differently with psychosocial adjustment for Black youth according to ethnicity and qualities of the neighborhood context. This research examined whether associations between ethnic–racial socialization messages and psychosocial adjustment vary by ethnicity and perceived neighborhood quality in a nationally representative sample of Black adolescents who participated in the National Survey of American Life Adolescent supplement study. The effects of promotion of mistrust messages varied by ethnicity, and the effects of egalitarianism messages varied depending on perceived neighborhood quality. These findings help clarify prior research which has yielded equivocal results for the effects of these messages for Black youth’s psychosocial adjustment.     

Organized Religious Involvement and Mental Health Among Caribbean Black Adolescents

Though religion has been related to better mental health, the aspects of organized religious life most salient for the mental health of Caribbean Black adolescents in the US, beyond religious service attendance, has been understudied. This research utilized a sub-sample of Caribbean Black adolescents from the NSAL-A, a nationally representative U.S. dataset, to examine (1) the prevalence of organized religious involvement (e.g., participation in religious service activities, choice to attend religious services) and (2) the relationship between organized religious involvement and mental health. Results showed that 62 % of Caribbean Black adolescents attend religious services regularly (at least a few times a month) and 49 % or more attend religious services or participate in religious activities (e.g., youth groups) by choice. Additionally, various aspects of organized religious involvement were positively related to coping and self-esteem, and negatively related to depressive symptoms. Religious service attendance was not related to any of the mental health indicators. Study results can inform the development of individual and group level interventions targeted at supporting the mental health of Caribbean Black adolescents.     

A statistical model of tracking

A method is proposed to model individual patterns of growth over time by linear combinations of optimally chosen weighted orthogonal vectors. The goal is to distinguish individuals who track from nontrackers. Nontrackers are defined as those who follow different, usually more complex, growth patterns than trackers. Thus, nontrackers require more vectors than do trackers in modeling their longitudinal observations. A method of specifying the class-specific vectors and individual weights is demonstrated. When the proportion of nontrackers in the population is small, a modified form of the Akaike maximum entropy criterion is used to select the number of vectors appopriate for each person and also to classify each person into a tracking category. When the proportion of nontrackers is large, the modified Akaike criterion together with scatterplots of the growth curve weights are needed to distinguish trackers from nontrackers. The apprach is illustrated with longitudinal observations of height measured in an epidemiologic survey of children.