Stressful life events and their contributions to symptoms of anxiety and depression in adolescents

There are several innovative aspects to this thesis that extend our current knowledge of the relations between stress and psychiatric symptoms in adolescents. First, distal and proximal stressors are differentiated. This approach allows one to specifically examine the role of early childhood stressors as well as stressors experienced more recently as they impact the expression of depression and anxiety during adolescence. Second, a state-of-the-art assessment instrument was used to examine proximal stressors, helping to distinguish several aspects of stress, including objective stress and subjective stress. Third, the parent study from which these data were derived was designed to examine the role of familial risk for depression and related risk factors for the initial development of depression and alcohol use disorders. This allowed for a very thorough collection of demographic characteristics of the study population. Accordingly, this thesis examines the initial prodromal expression of anxiety and depressive symptoms as they are originally expressed prior to the development, if any, of a full-blown psychiatric disorder.^