Due to armed conflict and other crises, many children worldwide have to flee their home country and are, consequently, at a high risk for mental health problems.
As the majority of previous research on refugee minors focused on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), we aimed to assess the prevalence and risk factors for depression in a clinical sample of refugee youth.
Data were collected during the standard diagnostic process in an outpatient refugee clinic in Germany. We assessed the prevalence of depression based on a diagnostic interview and investigated the association between age, gender, duration of flight, accompanying status, number of interpersonal traumatic experiences, residence status, and PTSD diagnosis with a depression diagnosis. More specifically, we conducted a Bayesian logistic regression with these associated factors as predictors and the presence of depression as the outcome. Additionally, we conducted a Bayesian network analysis including all these variables.
The majority of the 575 included refugee children were male (
The high prevalence of depression and its strong associations with PTSD suggest that refugee minors are likely to experience depressive symptoms which might develop from PTSD symptoms. This implies a need for monitoring depressive symptoms in refugee minors, especially when these have a PTSD diagnosis.