No: 22 / APPEARANCE OF CHILDHOOD DEPRESSION IN LATENCY PERIOD IN THE PROJECTIVE DRAWING TESTS

  • APPEARANCE OF CHILDHOOD DEPRESSION IN LATENCY PERIOD IN THE PROJECTIVE DRAWING TESTS

    Güneş Özen Urcan, Funda Akkapulu Aydın
    Summary :

    As drawings enable nonverbal communication and allow free associations, they are quite helpful tools in order to understand the patients. These tests are deployed frequently in the clinical settings when verbal communication is a challenge especially while working with children. As opposed to adults, depression in children is expressed through behaviors instead of language. Among the symptoms of a depressive child, we can see hyperactivity, over irritability, intense withdrawal and a decrease in psychomotor activity and an interest in the outside world. In this and study, we will analyze two cases who came to the clinic with various symptoms and were diagnosed with depression and a similar psychological pain as a result of the evaluation through drawing tests upon their clinical visit. In these two cases, the withdrawal symptom of depression was more dominant. The drawing tests were very facilitative to understand the psychological conflicts of these cases whose verbal skills were weak. Thus, this study aims to present the contributions of drawing tests to diagnose the depression and the effects of latent stage on child depression.

    Keywords : Childhood depression, latency period, drawing tests