This paper is divided into three parts. The first entitled Introduction The second reports the Clinical Material: presentation and discussion about the Social Service practice and last, the Final Considerations. In the first part we try to discuss two aspects: 1) some considerations about the concept of depression during childhood and adolescence; and the clinical description of situations with clear depressive aspects - "pure states" - and of "depressive reactions" situations in wich the aspects would be masked, commonly represented by restlessness, rebelion, somatic and hypocondrial concerns, anti-social behavior and others. The existence of some factors more intense during child - hood and adolescence than in adulthood - for instance impulsivity - contribute to this special presentation 2) the medico-psychological practice in a multiprofessional institution: a reflection about some of its problems, using a poin t of view not only medico-psychological but also, and most of all, social. We used the theme depression during childhood and adolescence considering Medicine and Psychiatry as a social science, and also, the essays to reincorporate the social dimension in the personal dynamics, that came from the social-political critics of Psychiatry. The two last parts describe the clinical material of our experience with children and teenagers in the Centro de Saúde Butantã, where we concieved the familiar group envolved with but not misunderstood as the "social de terminant" or as "all "social determinantes. We tried to comprehend problems of psychological alienation as moments of social alienations, We tend to cosider the "mentaly ill" notas a passive depositary of external things (for instance: the way some authors consider the social), but as some that leads to a dialectical interaction between one's interiority, one's environement and the others