Teens at Risk for Depression
Teens at risk quite often experience depression and just as often parents throw their hands up in the air and exclaim, “What in the world do you have to be depressed about?”
Bad idea. First you discount their pain and if you do that often enough, troubled teenagers will start to hide that hurt or sorrow and then it will really start doing some damage hidden when away from the light of day. True enough, next to a mortgage and bills and a job that grinds your very life away, a teen’s problems can certainly appear insignificant to a parent.
That is when parents have to employ some empathy and remember that in the scale of a teen’s world, a rejection from a friend or a sneer from the popular kids is tantamount to the mortgage getting behind. Teens usually really do not “get” that they have much to be grateful for because a good percentage of suburban teens have had little understanding of poverty or disease or those experiences that makes one grateful to have just survived to live another day.
Even if the depressed teen has blown a mole hole of a problem into a mountain of drama, the resulting depression, untreated, can lead a teen to self medicate, and therein lies the path to teen age drug abuse. If your teen has expressed sorrow or even jokingly proclaimed that life is to hard and not worth it, take care to make sure that there isn’t a deeper root to explore.
Relevant Tags:depressed teens, drug abuse, self medicate, suburban teens, teen age drug abuse, teen depression, troubled teenagers
