摘要:The depression is presented as a public health question. Thus, it reaches also children. This work aims to apprehend the social representations of depression on children of a public high school in João Pessoa-Pb/Brazil. 553 children were chosen, from 2 nd to 6 th degree, boys and girls, between 7 and 12 years old. The Children’s Depression Inventory was taken as screening accomplished with semi-structured interviews. These interviews were taken with 20 sintomatological depressive children. The analysis was improved by Bardin´s content analysis. Three empirical categories and 12 subcategories were achieved: description (subcategories: psychoaffective; psychosocial; psychocognitive; humoral and physical-organic), causes (subcategories: psychological, historic-factual and psychosocial) and treatment (subcategories: medical, psychological, psychosocial and physical-organic). With this study, a better comprehension of this sintomatology on childhood is expected.