Depression Across the Lifetime

This research area recognizes that depression manifests differently at various life stages and investigates these developmental variations. We study depression in children and adolescents, examining how it differs from adult depression in presentation, underlying mechanisms, and treatment response. Our work explores perinatal depression and its impact on both parents and offspring, midlife depression in the context of work and family stressors, and late-life depression with its unique relationship to cognitive decline, medical comorbidities, and social losses. We investigate how critical developmental periods create windows of vulnerability and opportunity for intervention, how early-life depression affects trajectories into adulthood, and how aging affects depression neurobiology. This lifespan perspective enables us to develop age-appropriate assessment tools, treatments, and prevention strategies tailored to the unique needs of each developmental stage.