The Effect of Childhood Trauma on the Alleviation of Transdiagnostic Depressive Symptoms and the Mediating Role of Resilience in Outpatient Adolescents.

Childhood traumatic experiences have long-term negative consequences for individual mental and physical well-being. Specifically, depression has proven to be a common consequence of previous trauma in adolescents. Furthermore, the course of depressive symptoms is worse in individuals with a traumatic history. Resilience may mitigate the impact of different types of trauma on depressive symptoms, but there is less information about these associations longitudinally. We therefore examined the effect of childhood trauma, including physical and emotional neglect and abuse, on the change in depressive symptoms over a six-month follow-up in outpatient adolescents, as well as the role of resilience in this association. We used a transdiagnostic approach by examining the depressive symptoms, resilience, and childhood traumatization, regardless of the psychiatric diagnosis, in a naturalistic study setting. Resilience measured with the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS), childhood adversities and trauma experiences, including emotional neglect, emotional abuse, physical neglect, physical abuse, and sexual abuse, measured with the Trauma and Distress Scale (TADS), and depressive symptoms measured with the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-IA) were self-evaluated at baseline and on six-month follow-up by 297 adolescent participants in a natural study setting. Paired sample t-tests were conducted to measure the change in BDI scores during the follow-up. Mediation and moderation analysis with resilience was performed to investigate the effect of resilience on the association between trauma subtypes and the change in depressive symptoms during the follow-up. Childhood adversities and trauma experiences associated with resilience, the strongest associations being with emotional abuse, emotional neglect, and physical neglect, as well as with the alleviation of depressive symptoms during the follow-up, except for sexual abuse. The latter effect was mediated by resilience, even after adjustment for several possible confounding factors. Only sexual abuse did not associate with the change in depressive symptoms through resilience. No moderating effect of resilience was observed on the association between trauma or any trauma subtype and the alleviation of depressive symptoms. The broad assessment of childhood traumatic experiences, including emotional neglect, emotional abuse, physical neglect, and physical abuse, together with resilience in relation to depressive symptoms, regardless the psychiatric diagnosis, followed by interventions focused on resilience enhancement is suggested to alleviate depression in outpatient adolescents with such experiences of trauma. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40653-025-00728-8.