Parent-Child Agreement on Depressive Symptoms in Depressed and Suicidal Youth

Accurately measuring depression symptom severity is important for understanding patient trajectories and aiding treatment decisions. To provide increased awareness of depressive symptoms in youth, a particularly vulnerable population, it is helpful to survey both the youth themselves and a parent/guardian. Past research, however, has shown that parent-child agreement can vary widely depending on the survey used and may be influenced by demographic factors. Here, we studied TX-YDSRN parent-child agreement on the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 modified for adolescents (PHQ-A), a commonly used scale to assess severity of depression. Our results showed little agreement between PHQ-A scores reported by the youth and the youth’s parent/guardian on the youth’s depression severity. Agreement was not influenced by the youth’s age, sex, ethnicity, or parental depression history, but agreement was higher when youth were receiving psychotherapy treatment. Our findings highlight the importance of recognizing how reports of youth depression symptom severity may be influenced by who completes the assessment, and such discrepancies may need to be considered during assessment and subsequent treatment decisions.