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More than half of orphaned youth age 12 to 24 who head households in rural Rwanda meet criteria for depression, according to a report in the August issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
The combined effects of the 1994 genocide and the HIV epidemic give Rwanda one of the highest numbers of orphans in the world—an estimated 290,000 in 2005, according to background information in the article. "Most African orphans have been absorbed into informal fostering systems," the authors write. "Such systems, however, are increasingly overwhelmed, and many orphans either head households or live on the street."
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