Clinical Depression

Emotional interactions between parents and their children are known to have a significant effect on the development and recurrence of clinical depression in children. While speech models used by existing conversation modeling algorithms can provide information about frequency of speech-silence states, the modeling process itself does not provide qualitative insights into the nature of the emotional process that underlies the speakers’ behavior. To address this issue, a recently proposed higher order emotional influence model (HOEIM) was applied to determine the extent to which “emotional influences” (interpreted as the values of the model coefficients) differed between families with depressed and non-depressed adolescents. The analysis was based on four speaker states: positive emotion, negative emotion, neutral emotion, and silence. The HOEIM estimated the conditional probabilities of these states in parent-child conversations in 29 families with clinically depressed adolescents (14-18 years old) and in 31 families with non-depressed adolescents. The trajectories of the model coefficients displayed across model orders increasing from 1 to 5 (corresponding to the memory time of past emotional states ranging from 1 to 5 seconds) indicated that parent-child interactions were significantly different between these two types of family environments, and the nature of these interactions clearly depended on the topic of conversation.

The origin of mental illness can be multifactorial, influencing the therapeutic route and treatment delays. We report in this paper the case of Miss B.D., young woman that, under the influence of multiple stress factors, and various conceptions of the disease, developed a table of severe depression with psychotic symptoms, the waning of hypertensive nephropathy. Despite the evidence brought by modern medicine in the treatment of such disorders (organic and psychiatric), distrust of administered therapeutics was observed with the addition of traditional and magical-religious treatment. This case illustrates the need to develop liaison psychiatry, to conduct information and awareness campaigns on mental illness and its treatment with the population of Burkina Faso.