A very interesting report, but they don't go far enough to show a link between depression and drinking. The report indicates that those people aged 12-17 who have experienced a major depressive episode (MDE) in the past year are more than twice as likely to try alcohol for the first time than those who have not experienced an MDE. This seems to show a very clear correlation, and in fact there may be a strong correlation, but we can't make that judgment based on those figures because they aren't broken down by age. As the table illustrates, the percentage of teens who have experienced an MDE in the past year rises sharply with age, from 4.3% of 12-year olds to 11.9% of 17-year olds. One would also suspect that the percentage of people in this age group who first tried alcohol in the past year would also rise with age, and indeed another page from the same report ( http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/NSDUH/2k6NSDUH/2k6results.cfm#Ch5 ) indicates that the mean age of first alcohol use is nearly 16 years. Thus the correlation between alcohol initiation and MDEs may in fact be nothing more than a correlation between alcohol use and age. There's no way to tell without disaggregating the statistics for both MDE and alcohol initiation for 12-year olds, then 13-year olds, and so on. It doesn't seem like this would have been hard to do, and I'm disappointed that the researchers didn't think to do so. I'm not saying there's no connection between depression and alcohol use in teens; I'm merely saying that this report doesn't actually show one, as it claims to do.

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