Emerging South African Trends on Adolescent Depression and Management Literacy: A Narrative Literature Review

Abstract

Background: Depression remains a huge mental health challenge across all age groups with less than a quarter of sufferers getting adequate services which call for concern. The prevalence cuts across all age groups, but this study strictly focused on adolescents.
Objective/purpose: This narrative literature review was to explore emerging South African trends on adolescent depression and management literacy to advance health science research.
Method: The literature review is narrative and followed an integrative synthesis approach which focused on summarising the contents of multiple studies on emerging South African trends in adolescent depression and management literacy. Peer-reviewed articles published from 2013 to 2019 were searched in the following databases “Sabinet Online” “Google scholar” and “ScienceDirect” with some keywords.
Results/conclusion: The study found that 30% of the reviewed literature focused on South Africa, 13% focused on other African countries, 47% focused on other countries outside Africa (the world), while 10% have no country of focus. Therefore, the study concluded that there is a dearth of literature on adolescent depression and management specifically within the South Africa context and Africa as a continent. This calls for more proactive measures and studies, owing to the ravaging nature of adolescent depression to the individual, family and the society.

Keywords: Adolescent, Depression, Emerging trends, Management literacy