Anxiety and Depression Symptoms in Spanish Children and Adolescents: An Exploration of Comorbidity from the Network Perspective

The combination of depression and anxiety is among the most prevalent comorbidities of disorders leading to substantial functional impairment in children and adolescents. The network perspective offers a new paradigm for understanding and measuring psychological constructs and their comorbidity. The present study aims to apply network analysis to explore the comorbidity between depression and anxiety symptoms. Specifically, the study examines bridge symptoms, comorbidity, and shortest pathway networks and estimates the impact of the symptoms in the network’s connectivity and structure. The findings show that “feeling lonely” and “feeling unloved” are identified as the most central bridge symptoms. The shortest path network suggests that the role of a mixed anxiety-depressive symptomatology, and specific and non-specific symptoms of clinical criteria, such as “worries,” “feels depressed,” “fears school,” and “talks about suicide” could serve as a warning for comorbidity.