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Interpersonal psychotherapy for depressed adolescents (IPT-A) is a brief, evidence-based psychotherapy that has been found to be successful in treating unipolar depression in non-bipolar, non-psychotic adolescents. This article provides an overview of the theoretical principles, developmental adaptations, interpersonal focus and techniques of IPT-A. Treatment specifically targets communication skills and social support in current relationships from a skills perspective. Therefore, the therapeutic focus is on improving the adolescent's relationships with the underlying assumption that this will improve the adolescent's mood. The empirical support for the effectiveness of IPT-A, preliminary findings from clinical trials of adaptations of IPT-A and future directions for research in unipolar adolescent depression are presented briefly.

Patients meeting criteria for borderline personality disorder are heterogeneous. Our studies suggest that at least two sub-types exist which benefit from specific treatments. Data will be presented which suggests that some patients who meet borderline criteria and have atypical depression (patients meeting DSM III-R criteria for major depression or dysthymia reactive wills mood and any vegetative atypical symptoms, i.e. overeating, oversleeping, rejection sensitivity, leaden paralysis) clearly benefit from treatment with antidepressant medication. Although some patients with atypical depression who meet borderline criteria will improve with tricyclic therapy, a significantly greater proportion will improve with the monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) phenelzine if they suffer from atypical depression. The validity of emotionally unstable character disorder (EUCD) will also be examined. Patients with this disorder frequently meet criteria for borderline character disorder. The validity of this sub-group is supported by the presence of neurological soft signs, their negative response to anti-depressants, and their positive response to chlorpromazine and lithium.

The research recently conducted and ongoing in adolescent obsessive-compulsive disorder indicates that the clinical signs and symptoms are indistinguishable from those seen in adults. Comorbidity appears to follow the same trends in adolescents and adults, with anxiety and affective symptomatology predominating. Contrary to expectation, Gilles de la Tourette disorder does not appear either as a concurrent syndrome, or as an eventual outcome in obsessive-compulsive adolescents. Males are greatly over-represented among adolescents with an early childhood onset. The neurological and neuropsychological findings are the only ones that appear to distinguish the adolescent and adult obsessive-compulsive patients. The findings point to frequent neurological abnormalities in adolescents with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The natural history over the short-term seems to be negatively affected by severity. The clinical efficacy of clomipramine and the failure of another tricyclic antidepressant parallels the therapeutic experience reported in adult patients. The presence of depression is unrelated to the efficacy of clomipramine. The neuropsychological and neurological abnormalities, together with the data from the longitudinal and treatment studies, strongly suggest that obsessive-compulsive disorder in adolescents is not a variant of the overall group of anxiety disorders.

This article represents the French translation of the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia (SADS), developed by researchers at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University (New York) to permit the selection of homogeneous samples of patients presenting with a defined psychiatric illness. The SADS was developed in the mid-1970s in an effort to provide research investigators with a clinical procedure which would reduce information variance in both diagnostic and descriptive evaluations of subjects. It provides: 1. A detailed description of the features of the current episode of illness when they were at their most severe; 2. A similar description of the major features during the week prior to the evaluation; 3. A detailed description of past psychopathology and functioning relevant to the evaluation of prognosis and overall severity of disturbance; and 4. A series of questions and criteria which enable one to make diagnoses using the Research Diagnostic Criteria. These criteria currently represent the most widely used nosologic system for clinical research in psychiatry, allowing for comparison of results and facilitation of replication by different research teams.