Adolescent Depression Quotes

So you try to think of someone else you're mad at, and the unavoidable answer pops into your little warped brain: everyone.

Girls are always saying things like, “I’m so unhappy that I’m going to overdose on aspirin,” but they’d be awfully surprised if they succeeded. They have no intention of dying. At the first sight of blood, they panic.

All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.” At the time Switters had disputed her assertion. Even at seventeen, he was aware that depression could have chemical causes. “The key word here is roots,” Maestra had countered. “The roots of depression. For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass. Even an old tomato like me can recall how painful, scary, and disillusioning that realization was. So, there's a tendency, then, to slip into rage and self-pity, which if indulged, can fester into bouts of depression.” “Yeah but Maestra—” “Don't interrupt. Now, unless someone stronger and wiser—a friend, a parent, a novelist, filmmaker, teacher, or musician—can josh us out of it, can elevate us and show us how petty and pompous and monumentally useless it is to take ourselves so seriously, then depression can become a habit, which, in tern, can produce a neurological imprint. Are you with me? Gradually, our brain chemistry becomes conditioned to react to negative stimuli in a particular, predictable way. One thing'll go wrong and it'll automatically switch on its blender and mix us that black cocktail, the ol’ doomsday daiquiri, and before we know it, we’re soused to the gills from the inside out. Once depression has become electrochemically integrated, it can be extremely difficult to philosophically or psychologically override it; by then it's playing by physical rules, a whole different ball game. That's why, Switters my dearest, every time you've shown signs of feeling sorry for yourself, I've played my blues records really loud or read to you from The Horse’s Mouth. And that’s why when you’ve exhibited the slightest tendency toward self-importance, I’ve reminded you that you and me— you and I: excuse me—may be every bit as important as the President or the pope or the biggest prime-time icon in Hollywood, but none of us is much more than a pimple on the ass-end of creation, so let’s not get carried away with ourselves. Preventive medicine, boy. It’s preventive medicine.” “But what about self-esteem?” “Heh! Self-esteem is for sissies. Accept that you’re a pimple and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way lies grace—and maybe even glory.

Physics could teach everything about the universe except why. That led to what he calls his adolescent existential crisis. “I began trying to figure out what the meaning of life and the universe was,” he says. “And I got real depressed about it, like maybe life may have no meaning.

Notice how those who have medicated away their hardships with illegal drugs, alcohol, or sex can seem immature. They may look forty-five, but they have the character of an adolescent. Find a person who has weathered storms rather than avoided them and you will find someone who is wise.

Being sixteen is officially the worst thing I've ever been.

The modern obsession with protecting young people from “feeling unsafe” is, we believe, one of the (several) causes of the rapid rise in rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide, which we’ll explore in chapter

The black devil and the blue devil: that was how he’d come to think of the two opposing sides of his nature. Since his early adolescence, the bloodthirsty pair had staked his mind as their battleground, and even now he could feel their presence, lurking, waiting to make their next move.

we're teenagers," Sylvia said. "we're all depressed.

Centuries ago, the irritant was established cultural authorities that shackled the mind in “self-imposed immaturity,” as Kant said. But our emergence from immaturity seems to have stalled at an adolescent stage, like a hippie who hasn’t aged very well. The irritants that stand out now are the self-delusions that have sprouted up around a project of liberation that has gone to seed, ushering in a “culture of performance” that makes us depressed.

A recent one entitled “Is There an Epidemic of Child or Adolescent Depression?” vindicated Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word no.

exercise during adolescence reduces depression, anxiety, and other emotional distress.

Parents also seriously underestimate the extent of depression in their adolescent children.

In theory, people who are depressed for a long time begin to produce higher and higher levels of cortisol,

By the early 1970s, when I went to college, everything you heard about LSD seemed calculated to terrify. It worked on me: I’m less a child of the psychedelic 1960s than of the moral panic that psychedelics provoked. I also had my own personal reason for steering clear of psychedelics: a painfully anxious adolescence that left me (and at least one psychiatrist) doubting my grip on sanity.

A 2001 study of adolescent school shooters, prompted in part by the massacre at Columbine High School, resulted in two interesting findings. The first is that 25 percent of the thirty-four teenage shooters they looked at participated in pairs. This is different from adult rampage killers, who most often act alone. Dr. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and expert on targeted violence and threat assessment, authored the study. He told me that these deadly dyads mean it’s absolutely critical for parents to pay attention to the dynamics between kids and their friends. The second finding from his study: typically, one of the two kids was a psychopath, and the other one suggestible, dependent, and depressed.

Studies find that cynical adolescents are more likely than non-cynics to become depressed college students, and cynical college students are more likely to drink heavily and divorce by middle age. Non-cynics earn steadily more money over their careers, but cynics financially flatline. Cynics are more likely to suffer heartbreak—and heart disease.

No matter how flat or sad his or her affect appears, the suicidally depressed adolescent is desperately trying to contain feelings of anger, rage, hatred, and violence. The suicide or the attempt represents the final self-destructive display of this rage. Where previously the rage may have been expressed in anti-social behaviors or directed at parents, school (the "system"), or a girl/boyfriend, now it has been turned inward. Not surprisingly, the suicide rate is much higher among runaways, teens in jail, and juvenile delinquents. Don't fear this anger! Allow the adolescent to express it; mobilize the anger rather than permitting it to remain festering inside, growing increasingly poisonous.

This produces teen vulnerability to peer pressure and emotional contagion. Moreover, such pressure is typically “deviance training,” increasing the odds of violence, substance abuse, crime, unsafe sex, and poor health habits (few teen gangs pressure kids to join them in tooth flossing followed by random acts of kindness). For example, in college dorms the excessive drinker is more likely to influence the teetotaling roommate than the reverse. The incidence of eating disorders in adolescents spreads among peers with a pattern resembling viral contagion. The same occurs with depression among female adolescents, reflecting their tendency to “co-ruminate” on problems, reinforcing one another’s negative affect.

For as long as I can remember I was frighteningly, although often wonderfully, beholden to moods. Intensely emotional as a child, mercurial as a young girl, first severely depressed as an adolescent, and then unrelentingly caught up in the cycles of manic-depressive illness by the time I began my professional life, I became, both by necessity and intellectual inclination, a student of moods.

Cuddled while someone played slowdive in the other room once, the day after i was thrown into a profound depression because jesus if you are in that situation and you acknowledge it even once in your life it can't be anything else than the product of a wasted adolescence. The amount of shoegaze fans who substitute their lack of personality and meaningful relationships with people, romantic or platonic, with music, is honestly staggering.

Utah ranks number one in incidents of depression and suicides, nationwide. One study reported: “In Utah, 14 percent of adults and adolescents reported experiencing severe psychological distress, and 10 percent said they’d had a major depressive episode in the past year. Bad mental health days come three times a month for those living in Utah.”i Incidentally, Utah leads the nation in fraud (see “God is Not a Good Investment Advisor,” chapter 8) and pornography consumptionii

Feeblemindedness,” in 1924, came in three distinct flavors: idiot, moron, and imbecile. Of these, an idiot was the easiest to classify—the US Bureau of the Census defined the term as a “mentally defective person with a mental age of not more than 35 months”—but imbecile and moron were more porous categories. On paper, the terms referred to less severe forms of cognitive disability, but in practice, the words were revolving semantic doors that swung inward all too easily to admit a diverse group of men and women, some with no mental illness at all—prostitutes, orphans, depressives, vagrants, petty criminals, schizophrenics, dyslexics, feminists, rebellious adolescents—anyone, in short, whose behavior, desires, choices, or appearance fell outside the accepted norm. Feebleminded women were sent to the Virginia State Colony for confinement to ensure that they would not continue breeding and thereby contaminate the population with further morons or idiots.

David Lester, a psychology professor at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey, has likely thought about suicide longer, harder, and from more angles than any other human. In more than twenty-five-hundred academic publications, he has explored the relationship between suicide and, among other things, alcohol, anger, antidepressants, astrological signs, biochemistry, blood type, body type, depression, drug abuse, gun control, happiness, holidays, Internet use, IQ, mental illness, migraines, the moon, music, national-anthem lyrics, personality type, sexuality, smoking, spirituality, TV watching, and wide-open spaces. Has all this study led Lester to some grand unified theory of suicide? Hardly. So far he has one compelling notion. It’s what might be called the “no one left to blame” theory of suicide. While one might expect that suicide is highest among people whose lives are the hardest, research by Lester and others suggests the opposite: suicide is more common among people with a higher quality of life. “If you’re unhappy and you have something to blame your unhappiness on—if it’s the government, or the economy, or something—then that kind of immunizes you against committing suicide,” he says. “It’s when you have no external cause to blame for your unhappiness that suicide becomes more likely. I’ve used this idea to explain why African-Americans have lower suicide rates, why blind people whose sight is restored often become suicidal, and why adolescent suicide rates often rise as their quality of life gets better.

Negative body image in adolescent girls is of growing concern in the modern society. As girls go through puberty, their bodies gain adipose and move farther away from the thin childish appearance. You simply need to take a look at a fashion magazine to see how the fake ideal feminine body represented in it is often asexual and childlike. Such a medium influences the girls and causes them to become dissatisfied with their natural appearance. And this leads to depression. Importantly, depression is a significant risk factor for substance abuse and suicide attempts.

Had she been able to listen to her body, the true Virginia would certainly have spoken up. In order to do so, however, she needed someone to say to her: “Open your eyes! They didn’t protect you when you were in danger of losing your health and your mind, and now they refuse to see what has been done to you. How can you love them so much after all that?” No one offered that kind of support. Nor can anyone stand up to that kind of abuse alone, not even Virginia Woolf. Malcolm Ingram, the noted lecturer in psychological medicine, believed that Woolf’s “mental illness” had nothing to do with her childhood experiences, and her illness was genetically inherited from her family. Here is his opinion as quoted on the Virginia Woolf Web site: As a child she was sexually abused, but the extent and duration is difficult to establish. At worst she may have been sexually harassed and abused from the age of twelve to twenty-one by her [half-]brother George Duckworth, [fourteen] years her senior, and sexually exploited as early as six by her other [half-] brother… It is unlikely that the sexual abuse and her manic-depressive illness are related. However tempting it may be to relate the two, it must be more likely that, whatever her upbringing, her family history and genetic makeup were the determining factors in her mood swings rather than her unhappy childhood [italics added]. More relevant in her childhood experience is the long history of bereavements that punctuated her adolescence and precipitated her first depressions.3 Ingram’s text goes against my own interpretation and ignores a large volume of literature that deals with trauma and the effects of childhood abuse. Here we see how people minimize the importance of information that might cause pain or discomfort—such as childhood abuse—and blame psychiatric disorders on family history instead. Woolf must have felt keen frustration when seemingly intelligent and well-educated people attributed her condition to her mental history, denying the effects of significant childhood experiences. In the eyes of many she remained a woman possessed by “madness.” Nevertheless, the key to her condition lay tantalizingly close to the surface, so easily attainable, and yet neglected. I think that Woolf’s suicide could have been prevented if she had had an enlightened witness with whom she could have shared her feelings about the horrors inflicted on her at such an early age. But there was no one to turn to, and she considered Freud to be the expert on psychic disorders. Here she made a tragic mistake. His writings cast her into a state of severe uncertainty, and she preferred to despair of her own self rather than doubt the great father figure Sigmund Freud, who represented, as did her family, the system of values upheld by society, especially at the time.   UNFORTUNATELY,

The more I looked around, the more I listened to the music, watched television and movies, and examined sexist advertising, the more convinced I became that, as a society, we were on the wrong path with our daughters. American culture was poisonous to teenage girls. The messages girls received about sex, beauty and their place in the world truncated their development and left many of them traumatized. With the onset of puberty, girls were crashing into a junk culture that was just too hard for them to understand and master. Many became overwhelmed, depressed and angry.

Of greatest concern is the growing body of evidence linking regular marijuana use to an increased risk of developing severe psychiatric illnesses, especially during adolescence. In 2017, just over 37 percent of twelfth graders used it at least once during the year, and 5.9 percent used it every day—a huge jump over 1992, when only 1.9 percent were daily users. The more regularly a teen uses marijuana and the higher the potency, the greater his or her risk of becoming schizophrenic. Heavy users are also more likely than others to be depressed; and, what’s worse, marijuana use during depression reduces the rate of recovery.

When you start a child on meds, you risk numbing him to life at the very moment he’s learning to calibrate risks and handle life’s ups and downs. When you anesthetize a child to the vicissitudes of success and failure and love and loss and disappointment when he’s meeting these for the first time, you’re depriving him of the emotional musculature he’ll need as an adult. Once on meds, he’s likely to believe that he can’t handle life at full strength—and thanks to an adolescence spent on them, he may even be right. If you can relieve your child’s anxiety, depression, or hyperactivity without starting her on meds, it’s worth turning your life upside down to do so.

Coopersmith’s study with adolescent boys indicates that children develop self-trust, adventuresomeness and the ability to deal with adversity if they are treated with respect and are provided with well-defined standards of values, demands for competence and guidance toward solutions of problems. The development of individual self-reliance is fostered by a well-structured, demanding environment, rather than by largely unlimited permissiveness and freedom to explore in an unfocused way. The research of both Stanley Coopersmith and Morris Rosenberg has led them to believe that pupils with high self-esteem perceive themselves as successful. They are relatively free of anxiety and psychosomatic symptoms, and can realistically assess their abilities. They are confident that their efforts will meet with success, while being fully aware of their limitations. Persons with high self-esteem are outgoing and socially successful and expect to be well received. They accept others and others tend to accept them. On the other hand, according to Coopersmith and Rosenberg, pupils with low self-esteem are easily discouraged and sometimes depressed. They feel isolated, unloved and unlovable. They seem incapable of expressing themselves or defending their inadequacies. They are so preoccupied with their self-consciousness and anxiety that their capacity for self-fulfillment can be easily destroyed.4

The strongest evidence yet was published in 2010. In a painstaking long-term study, much larger and more thorough than anything done previously, an international team of researchers tracked one thousand children in New Zealand from birth until the age of thirty-two. Each child’s self-control was rated in a variety of ways (through observations by researchers as well as in reports of problems from parents, teachers, and the children themselves). This produced an especially reliable measure of children’s self-control, and the researchers were able to check it against an extraordinarily wide array of outcomes through adolescence and into adulthood. The children with high self-control grew up into adults who had better physical health, including lower rates of obesity, fewer sexually transmitted diseases, and even healthier teeth. (Apparently, good self-control includes brushing and flossing.) Self-control was irrelevant to adult depression, but its lack made people more prone to alcohol and drug problems. The children with poor self-control tended to wind up poorer financially. They worked in relatively low-paying jobs, had little money in the bank, and were less likely to own a home or have money set aside for retirement. They also grew up to have more children being raised in single-parent households, presumably because they had a harder time adapting to the discipline required for a long-term relationship. The children with good self-control were much more likely to wind up in a stable marriage and raise children in a two-parent home. Last, but certainly not least, the children with poor self-control were more likely to end up in prison. Among those with the lowest levels of self-control, more than 40 percent had a criminal conviction by the age of thirty-two, compared with just 12 percent of the people who had been toward the high end of the self-control distribution in their youth.

The issues of antidepressant-associated suicide has become front-page news, the result of an analysis suggesting a link between medication use and suicidal ideation among children, adolescents, a link between medication use and suicidal ideation among children, adolescents, and adults up to age 24 in short term (4 to 16 weeks), placebo-controlled trials of nine newer antidepressant drugs. The data from trials involving more than 4.4(K) patients suggested that the average risk of suicidal thinking or behavior (suicidality) during the first few months of treatment in those receiving antidepressants was 4 percent, twice the placebo risk of 2 percent. No suicides occured in these trials. The analysis also showed no increase in suicide risk among the 25 to 65 age group. Antidepressants reduced suicidality among those over age 65. Following public hearings on the subject, in October 2004, the FDA requested the addition of “black box” warnings—the most serious warning placed on the labeling of a prescription medication—to all antidepressant drugs, old and new.

I had no use for professions. Utterly none. There were accountants and engineers in the soup lines. In the world slump, professions were useless. You were free, therefore, to make something extraordinary of yourself. I might have said, if I hadn’t been excited to the point of sickness, that I didn’t ride around the city on the cars to make a buck or to be useful to the family, but to take a reading of this boring, depressed, ugly, endless, rotting city. I couldn’t have thought it then, but I now understand that my purpose was to interpret this place. Its power was tremendous. But so was mine, potentially. I refused absolutely to believe for a moment that people here were doing what they thought they were doing. Beneath the apparent life of these streets was their real life, beneath each face the real face, beneath each voice and its words the true tone and the real message. Of course, I wasn’t about to say such things. It was beyond me at that time to say them. I was, however, a high-toned kid, “La-di-dah,” my critical, satirical brother Albert called me. A high purpose in adolescence will expose you to that.

People always feel sorry for you if you’re physically sick. It doesn’t matter if you have cancer or a cold. People always feel sorry for you and ask you if you’re okay. You need money? You got it! You want to meet a celebrity? Of course you can! You want to go to a convention, ComiCon, Disney World, anywhere in the world? You’re going to go there. That doesn’t happen when you’re mentally ill. If you’re mentally ill, people look at you differently. People roll their eyes when you talk about how sad you are. People won’t lift a finger to help you. “Get a job,” they’ll tell you. “Stop being so lazy. Be grateful you don’t have cancer. Get over it. It’s in the past. You have no reason to be sad.” And that isn’t how it works. But, of course, they wouldn’t know that. They’ve never been mentally ill, they don’t know how you can be so permanently damaged by your past that your present is painful and your future looks bleak. They don’t understand that most days getting out of bed is a chore. They don’t get that sometimes getting a job is out of the question because you’re just too damn afraid to even speak to anyone. That isn’t something you can just get over. But no one knows that because mental illnesses aren’t a real problem apparently. Apparently, the fact that over 800,000 million people die from suicide each year isn’t a real problem. Apparently, the fact that 15% of the adolescent population self-harms isn’t a real problem either. And, apparently, it isn’t a cause to worry that one in 200 American women suffer from an eating disorder. And, as I stand on the balcony, staring at the glittering city, thinking about the short time I spent in Paperthin Hearts, meeting all of the damaged children, I wonder how in the world people don’t understand what a mistake they’re making when they assume that having cancer is worse than being depressed or anxious or wanting to starve yourself to the point of death. How is that a mystery to anyone? Cancer patients are told they’re brave. They’re all made out to be martyrs. They’re given everything they need. Almost all of them. Mental health patients? They’re lucky if they get the right treatment they need before their broken, bleeding hearts, desperate only for love, destroy a part of them that can never be repaired.

Psychologists who study peer influence ask what it is about teenage girls that makes them so susceptible to peer contagion and so good at spreading it. Many believe it has something to do with the way girls tend to socialize.35 “When we listen to girls versus boys talk to each other, girls are much more likely to reply with statements that are validating and supportive than questioning,” Amanda Rose, professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, told me. “They’re willing to suspend reality to get into their friends’ worlds more. For this reason, adolescent girls are more likely to take on, for instance, the depression their friends are going through and become depressed themselves.” This female tendency to meet our friends where they are and share in their pain can be a productive and valuable social skill. Co-rumination (excessive discussion of a hardship) “does make the relationship between girls stronger,” Professor Rose told me. But it also leads friends to take on each other’s ailments. Teenage girls spread psychic illness because of features natural to their modes of friendship: co-rumination; excessive reassurance seeking; and negative-feedback seeking, in which someone maintains a feeling of control by angling for confirmation of her low self-concept from others.36 It isn’t hard to see why the 24/7 forum of social media intensifies and increases the incidence of each.

The Blue Mind Rx Statement Our wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans. The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being. In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters. Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history. Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more. Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety. We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points: •Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies. •Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits. •All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy. •Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both. •Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support. •Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water.

It is common to assume that multi-racialism is inevitable, and that racial identity will disappear as races mix. Americans prefer to think that the “tragic mulatto,” welcome in neither community, was either a myth or a reflection of outmoded racist thinking. Research suggests things may not be so simple. A 2003 study of 90,000 middle-school and high-school students found that black/white mixed-race children had more health and psychological problems than children who were either black or white. They were more likely to be depressed, sleep badly, skip school, smoke, drink, consider suicide, and have sex. White/Asian children showed similar symptoms. The principal author concluded that the cause was “the struggle with identity formation, leading to lack of self-esteem, social isolation and problems of family dynamics in biracial households.” The authors of a 2008 study reached the same conclusion: “When it comes to engaging in risky/anti-social adolescent behavior, however, mixed race adolescents are stark outliers compared to both blacks and whites. . . . Mixed race adolescents—not having a natural peer group—need to engage in more risky behaviors to be accepted.” A study of white/Asian children found that they were twice as likely as mono-racial children—34 percent vs. 17 percent—to suffer from psychological disorders such as anxiety, depression or drug abuse. Yoonsun Choi of the University of Chicago found that in Seattle middle schools, a clear racial identity seemed to protect against certain problems. Bi-racial children were the group most likely to smoke, take drugs, have been in fights, hurt someone badly, or carry a gun. Prof. Choi believes mixed-race children suffer because no racial group accepts them. “There is some indication that a strong ethnic identity helps protect kids from these [undesirable] behaviors,” she said.

As Dr. Fauci’s policies took hold globally, 300 million humans fell into dire poverty, food insecurity, and starvation. “Globally, the impact of lockdowns on health programs, food production, and supply chains plunged millions of people into severe hunger and malnutrition,” said Alex Gutentag in Tablet Magazine.27 According to the Associated Press (AP), during 2020, 10,000 children died each month due to virus-linked hunger from global lockdowns. In addition, 500,000 children per month experienced wasting and stunting from malnutrition—up 6.7 million from last year’s total of 47 million—which can “permanently damage children physically and mentally, transforming individual tragedies into a generational catastrophe.”28 In 2020, disruptions to health and nutrition services killed 228,000 children in South Asia.29 Deferred medical treatments for cancers, kidney failure, and diabetes killed hundreds of thousands of people and created epidemics of cardiovascular disease and undiagnosed cancer. Unemployment shock is expected to cause 890,000 additional deaths over the next 15 years.30,31 The lockdown disintegrated vital food chains, dramatically increased rates of child abuse, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, obesity, mental illness, as well as debilitating developmental delays, isolation, depression, and severe educational deficits in young children. One-third of teens and young adults reported worsening mental health during the pandemic. According to an Ohio State University study,32 suicide rates among children rose 50 percent.33 An August 11, 2021 study by Brown University found that infants born during the quarantine were short, on average, 22 IQ points as measured by Baylor scale tests.34 Some 93,000 Americans died of overdoses in 2020—a 30 percent rise over 2019.35 “Overdoses from synthetic opioids increased by 38.4 percent,36 and 11 percent of US adults considered suicide in June 2020.37 Three million children disappeared from public school systems, and ERs saw a 31 percent increase in adolescent mental health visits,”38,39 according to Gutentag. Record numbers of young children failed to reach crucial developmental milestones.40,41 Millions of hospital and nursing home patients died alone without comfort or a final goodbye from their families. Dr. Fauci admitted that he never assessed the costs of desolation, poverty, unhealthy isolation, and depression fostered by his countermeasures. “I don’t give advice about economic things,”42 Dr. Fauci explained. “I don’t give advice about anything other than public health,” he continued, even though he was so clearly among those responsible for the economic and social costs.

PATTERNS OF THE “SHY” What else is common among people who identify themselves as “shy?” Below are the results of a survey that was administered to 150 of my program’s participants. The results of this informal survey reveal certain facts and attitudes common among the socially anxious. Let me point out that these are the subjective answers of the clients themselves—not the professional opinions of the therapists. The average length of time in the program for all who responded was eight months. The average age was twenty-eight. (Some of the answers are based on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being the lowest.) -Most clients considered shyness to be a serious problem at some point in their lives. Almost everyone rated the seriousness of their problem at level 5, which makes sense, considering that all who responded were seeking help for their problem. -60 percent of the respondents said that “shyness” first became enough of a problem that it held them back from things they wanted during adolescence; 35 percent reported the problem began in childhood; and 5 percent said not until adulthood. This answer reveals when clients were first aware of social anxiety as an inhibiting force. -The respondents perceived the average degree of “sociability” of their parents was a 2.7, which translates to “fair”; 60 percent of the respondents reported that no other member of the family had a problem with “shyness”; and 40 percent said there was at least one other family member who had a problem with “shyness.” -50 percent were aware of rejection by their peers during childhood. -66 percent had physical symptoms of discomfort during social interaction that they believed were related to social anxiety. -55 percent reported that they had experienced panic attacks. -85 percent do not use any medication for anxiety; 15 percent do. -90 percent said they avoid opportunities to meet new people; 75 percent acknowledged that they often stay home because of social fears, rather than going out. -80 percent identified feelings of depression that they connected to social fears. -70 percent said they had difficulty with social skills. -75 percent felt that before they started the program it was impossible to control their social fears; 80 percent said they now believed it was possible to control their fears. -50 percent said they believed they might have a learning disability. -70 percent felt that they were “too dependent on their parents”; 75 percent felt their parents were overprotective; 50 percent reported that they would not have sought professional help if not for their parents’ urging. -10 percent of respondents were the only child in their families; 40 percent had one sibling; 30 percent had two siblings; 10 percent had three; and 10 percent had four or more. Experts can play many games with statistics. Of importance here are the general attitudes and patterns of a population of socially anxious individuals who were in a therapy program designed to combat their problem. Of primary significance is the high percentage of people who first thought that “shyness” was uncontrollable, but then later changed their minds, once they realized that anxiety is a habit that can be broken—without medication. Also significant is that 50 percent of the participants recognized that their parents were the catalyst for their seeking help. Consider these statistics and think about where you fit into them. Do you identify with this profile? Look back on it in the coming months and examine the ways in which your sociability changes. Give yourself credit for successful breakthroughs, and keep in mind that you are not alone!

The Kapha Season Kapha season is like springtime for your body. For the first twenty years, your body builds bones and tissues, and the circadian rhythm fluctuates wildly at times, trying to find a balance. Babies aren’t born with a set sleep schedule, but they develop one quickly during the first months of life. Gradually, the body settles into a system in which the hormones, blood pressure, bowels, and other systems function on a diurnal schedule. Anyone with teenagers knows that they give up their regular sleep habits and become night owls. They are impossible to pry out of bed in the morning and sleep until noon on weekends. In fact, some researchers suggest that the real end of adolescence can be marked by the time when young adults give up trying to stay up so late. Teenagers’ eating schedules, too, become erratic as they crave energy while their bodies are growing and maturing. When they get out of balance, teens can struggle in school and get inflammatory conditions, such as acne. They can adopt dietary habits that will be harder to shake as they become adults, which can lead to weight gain and depression in adulthood. This is a crucial time to introduce kids to healthy eating, a good night’s sleep, and plenty of exercise. Their growing bodies demand a lot of fuel, and their muscles need to move in order to develop properly. I often see patients who are still in their teen years struggling with school, friendships, and finding a sense of purpose. Though it may sound surprising, I can often trace these problems back to an unhealthy schedule, including late nights of doing homework (or texting while pretending to do homework), and eating unhealthy foods late in the day. Another culprit is little or no exercise, and a lack of natural light. Kids need natural light during these critical growing years.

In his TED Talk, entitled The Decline of Play and the Rise of Mental Disorders, he will open your eyes in several ways. In addition to describing play as a critical learning experience, he also compellingly cites the “reality that over the past 60 years in the United States there has been a gradual but, overall dramatic decline in children’s freedom to play with other children, without adult direction. Over this same period, there has been a gradual but overall dramatic increase in anxiety, depression, feelings of helplessness, suicide, and narcissism in children and adolescents.

Adolescent Warning Signs Lack of peer relationships outside the family Anxiety in social situations Difficulty with social skills such as keeping a conversation going Depression, withdrawal Confusion Sexual identity problems Interpersonal problems—trouble interacting with people Sleep problems, including excessive sleeping Stress-related physical symptoms Feelings of persecution Family conflicts Antisocial attitudes Overdependence on TV, computer, or video games Using subjective symptoms as a way of avoiding responsibilities Procrastination Fear of groups Lack of planning or organization Difficulty with self-expression Feelings of loneliness Physical complaints Difficulty making and keeping friends; stormy relationships with peers Fear of new situations Rationalization about lack of social life Learning disabilities

Sometimes, it takes just a moment free of fear, judgment, and ego to allow you the space to make the best, most impactful parenting decisions.

They are the last American generation to remember the years of the Great Depression, and the last to know a time before the end of World War II. Unlike the Greatest generation just before them, who were adults at the time, Silents experienced these events as children and adolescents. Nearly all Silents were born too late to serve in World War II, creating a dividing line in generational experience.

You don’t know it, but these are the last moments of the brief courtship you get to have with yourself as a female human being in 1990s America, a courtship in which you do not “love yourself” or “hate yourself” (because those terms would not have made sense to you) but instead have a profound sense of satisfaction with the world around you and your apparent role in it. Then something happens to you. It’s not a single-event trauma. Your parents do not get divorced. No one dies. You are not abused. And yet. Something happens to you. And because you cannot trace what happens to you to a single, traumatic event, you struggle to explain it, struggle for years to admit that anything happened to you at all. But it did. It’s obvious, visible in your face, your posture. A friend in middle school tells you that her mom has asked her, “What happened to Jessica?” What happened to you? It’s a big fish of a question, large and slippery. When you are twelve years old, a book titled Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls becomes a national best-seller. The author, Mary Pipher, writes, “Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence. Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves.” Pipher argues that while adolescence has always been a difficult transition for boys and girls alike, there is something in the cultural air of the early 1990s that has spawned an epidemic of depression, self-mutilation, and eating disorders.

Generally speaking, adolescents, especially girls, with depression and anxiety should have limited exposure to body image messaging centered on weight, weight loss, and dieting that may generate behaviors with those foci and create or make worse depressive symptoms.

The children near them swap secrets in whiny pre-teen voices, gossiping about friendships and romances and other petty school dramas. They seem not to see Abernathy or his new auditor. They have no idea what awaits them. Not the slightest hint that their friendships are fleeting, their wills to live soon to be devoured, a working world waiting to swallow them alive, their children, though they are just children themselves, already doomed to die. They have no idea that they will struggle to meet even their most basic needs as they hurtle through a marketplace inhospitable to human functions and that they will be fated to take this inhospitability personally, as we all are, as if it were their fault they could not simply work harder, faster, longer. The collapse of their personhood is only a few scant years away, yet these lanky adolescents remain oblivious. All of them, every single one, will have to sell their life to someone, for something. They appear now, before such a collapse, to be happy. Which, to Abernathy, is particularly a depressing contrast.

Arguing about the functions of mood can be challenging. Some hypothesized functions of mood play out over time and are nearly impossible to test decisively with a laboratory experiment. Take the hypotheses that (1) low mood helps people disengage from unattainable goals and (2) we end up better off as a result of letting go. Testing this hypothesized chain of events requires data about the real-world goals that people want to attain and the ability to measure people’s adjustment and well-being over the longer term. A nonexperimental study of adolescent girls in Canada did just this, collecting four waves of longitudinal data on the relationship between goals and depression over nineteen months. Consistent with the first hypothesis, those adolescents who had depressive symptoms reported a tendency to become more disengaged from goals over time. The stereotypical image of a disengaged adolescent sulking in her room with an iPod may not look like the process of rebuilding psychological health. Results were in fact consistent with the idea that letting go was a positive development: those adolescents who became more disengaged from goals ended up being better off, reporting lower levels of depression in the later assessments.

McGill–Oxford meta-analysis found a 37% increased risk of depression and more than a 300% increase risk in suicidal ideation among adolescents who used cannabis.8

There’s something else. Nora drops her chin, embarrassed by what she’s about to confess: “I’ve noticed with a lot of people who’ll use their mental issues—it’s almost like a conversation piece. It’s almost like a trend.” I reassure her that she’s at least the twelfth adolescent to tell me this. She exhales. What’s it like to have so many friends suffering with anxiety disorders and depression? Actually, she tells me, those who don’t have a diagnosis feel left out. “You’re expected to have these mental issues. And these things that are being normalized—these things are not normal,” she says. “I’m surrounded by it, so I think that in some ways, it has become our new normal. How is it possible, with all

I rolled around and hit my face to wake myself up, but the pain proved that everything was real - because pain is another word for reality. The surfaces were hard, indeed. My eyes were wide open and lucid, but fear had deformed everything, it had driven me into the hallucination and delirium. I stood up, shook the industrial refuse from my clothes, and went back, my heart beating more strongly than it should have, to the door gaping open in the great building's wall. I knew full well that on the outside, the building was perfectly rectangular, that there was no way for the door to open into a room, and yet it led into a virtual depth, as inexplicable as the depth of a photograph, or the depths of perspective that create a third, and false, dimension in paintings on a wall. If you could go inside a trompe l'oeil mural, you wouldn't descend into its fraudulent depths, you would only get smaller as you moved along unseen lines of perspective. You wouldn't move through constantly changing spaces, with porphyry arches and columns and unintelligible Biblical images opening and closing behind you; rather, they would change their shapes constantly, rectangles would become parallelograms and trapezoids, the arcs of circles would change into hyperbolas, and circle into ellipses, becoming thinner and thinner as they tried to look deeper and farther away. I often thought that the world, along its three dimensions, is an equally deceiving trompe l'oeil for the infinitely more complex eye of our mind, with its two cerebral hemispheres taking in the world at slightly different angles, such that, by combining rational analysis and mystical sensibility, speech and song, happiness and depression, the abject and the sublime, it will make the amazing rosebud of the fourth dimension open before us, with its pearly petals, with its full depth, with its cubic surface, with its hypercubic volume. As though an embryo didn't grow in its mother's womb but arrived, from far away, and only the illusion of perspective made it seem to grow, like a wayfarer approaching along an empty road. A wayfarer who, after he passes through the iliac portal, continues his illusory rise, first an infant, then a child, then an adolescent, and in the end, when he is face-to-face with you and looks you in the eyes, he smiles at you like a friend from the other side of the mirror, having found you again, at last.

To make matters worse, they may also face the burden of negative feedback from their teachers and families, who have yet to understand this disorder fully. In turn, children with ADHD must learn to deal with being told that they are lazy or stubborn simply because they cannot focus on something that is not initially interesting. This can also lead them to self-doubt; lacking self-esteem can be detrimental in the long run. As they might progress throughout their adult lives, there is a higher possibility that they may also develop anxiety disorders and depression.

My pastor mentioned Kierkegaard in a sermon only once, and it would be a long time before I discovered that there was a storied Christian who suffered from, and so in some way sanctioned, depression, rage, sarcasm, and despair - the diseases that took hold in adolescence, for which church offered no cure.

The survival adaptation developed by these children is similar to that of any trauma survivor, with attendant psychic numbing, restricted affect, hypervigilance, and recurrent intrusive dreams and flashbacks of earlier traumatic experiences. The home environments of these children are what psychiatrist Frederic Flach calls “depressogenic” (156). These homes lack ego support, prevent the development of healthy self-reliance, create hostility and block its release, promote feelings of guilt, and cause the child to feel lonely and rejected. Such an environment engenders a chronic, pervasive sense of loss that tends to be outside of the child’s conscious awareness. It predisposes children raised in these homes to problems with depression in adolescence and adulthood.

No. 1, when you ask who’s interested in this, the usual answer is, terminally ill people with excruciating pain. False. Factually not true. It tends to be a preoccupation of people who are depressed or hopeless for other reasons. No surprise, actually, if you look at what leads to suicide: hopelessness and depression. You have to look at euthanasia or assisted suicide as more like suicide than like a good death. Second, this notion that there’s no slippery slope, as advocates have long claimed? Totally wrong. Look at Belgium and the Netherlands: First, it’s accepted for adults who are competent and give consent. Then, it’s “We’re going to extend it to neonates with genetic defects, and adolescents.” Any time we do anything in medicine, it’s the same way: We develop an intervention for a narrow group of people, and once it’s well accepted, it gets expanded. I think it’s false to say, “We can hold the line here.” It doesn’t work that way. Third, people say this is a quick, reliable, painless intervention. No medical intervention in history is quick, reliable, painless and has no flaws. In the Netherlands, there’s about a 17 to 20 percent rate of problems, something screwing up. Initially, when the Oregon people published — “We have no problems. Every case went flawlessly!” — you knew the data was wrong. It had to be wrong. Either you’re not getting every case, so the denominator was wrong, or people are lying. There’s nobody who does a procedure, not even blood draws, and it’s perfect every time. So this idea that this is quick, reliable and painless is nonsense. And the last and most important point is: You want to legalize these interventions to improve end-of-life care in this country? That’s your motivation and this is your method? PS: I don’t think people argue that–— ZE: [interrupting] Oh, people do argue that! That is the justification for these procedures: It’s going to improve end-of-life care and give people control. The problem is, even in countries that have legalized it for a long time, at best 3 percent of people die this way in the Netherlands and Belgium. At best, 10 percent express interest in it. That is not a way to improve end-of-life care. You don’t focus lots of attention and effort on 3 percent. It’s the 97 percent, if you want to improve care. The typical response is, we can do both. Hmmm. Every system I’ve ever seen has a bandwidth problem: You can only do so much. We ought to focus our attention on the vast, vast majority, 97 percent of people, for whom this is not the right intervention and get that right — and we are far from that. I don’t think legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide are the way to go. It’s a big, big distraction.

When he was an adolescent—although he was heterosexual—the worst possible thing Isaac could think of was being gay, which could cause relentless teasing by his classmates in school. So this is where the imp began his torment of Isaac. Perhaps he would stare at an attractive female classmate and feel pleasantly aroused; but the imp would lead him to think that perhaps it was really the boy sitting next to her that he was really attracted to. Soon, whenever he saw an attractive boy in school or on the street or in the gym, he would find himself scanning his body to try to feel certain that he wasn’t sexually aroused.4 “Was that the first tingling of an erection?” he’d ask himself. Of course, simply thinking about the area would sensitize it, which might be enough to convince him that he really was homosexual. He might then go home and lie in bed, depressed and thinking about suicide, certain that his classmates would soon discover the truth and begin teasing him mercilessly.

Until then, my teenage soul--suspicious of cheerfulness, though still reflexively respectful of authority--would feel increasingly uncomfortable in the presence of the official soul. The official soul, as transmitted through church and Christian paraphernalia, was upbeat, incurious, happy with its lot. It did not have any heroes other than the ones who appeared in the Bible, and it was content to hear the same stories about these people over and over again. It described pain and suffering in such a way that a person might think alcoholism or the loss of a child were no more inconvenient than a tussle with the flu: after it passed, you could stand in front of the congregation on Sunday and testify that it was all better, and God was good. As far as I could tell, that was the only story told by the official soul, and the real and true sadnesses had be excised for a more mellifluous account. Which made it seem as if there were things you couldn't talk about in church, or with people from church--what made you laugh, why you cried at a movie, what made you angry, or what books you read that hadn't been written by C.S. Lewis, A.W. Tozer, or D.L. Moody. Church was supposed to be the most important thing in life, but so much of life was left out, because so much of its trouble was assumed to be conquered. My pastor mentioned Kierkegaard in a sermon only once, and it would be a long time before I discovered that there was a storied Christian who suffered from, and so in some way sanctioned, depression, rage, sarcasm, and despair--the diseases that took hold in adolescence, for which church offered no cure.

Mario Cuomo famously said that we campaign in poetry and govern in prose. We also critique the government in poetry—angsty, adolescent poetry, but poetry nonetheless. The

While I was doing my fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry, my family and I lived in Hawaii. When my son was seven years old, I took him to a marine life educational and entertainment park for the day. We went to the killer whale show, the dolphin show, and finally the penguin show. The penguin’s name was Fat Freddie. He did amazing things: He jumped off a twenty-foot diving board; he bowled with his nose; he counted with his flippers; he even jumped through a hoop of fire. I had my arm around my son, enjoying the show, when the trainer asked Freddie to get something. Freddie went and got it, and he brought it right back. I thought, “Whoa, I ask this kid to get something for me, and he wants to have a discussion with me for twenty minutes, and then he doesn’t want to do it!” I knew my son was smarter than this penguin. I went up to the trainer afterward and asked, “How did you get Freddie to do all these really neat things?” The trainer looked at my son, and then she looked at me and said, “Unlike parents, whenever Freddie does anything like what I want him to do, I notice him! I give him a hug, and I give him a fish.” The light went on in my head. Whenever my son did what I wanted him to do, I paid little attention to him, because I was a busy guy, like my own father. However, when he didn’t do what I wanted him to do, I gave him a lot of attention because I didn’t want to raise a bad kid! I was inadvertently teaching him to be a little monster in order to get my attention. Since that day, I have tried hard to notice my son’s good acts and fair attempts (although I don’t toss him a fish, since he doesn’t care for them) and to downplay his mistakes. We’re both better people for it. I collect penguins as a way to remind myself to notice the good things about the people in my life a lot more than the bad things. This has been so helpful for me as well as for many of my patients. It is often necessary to have something that reminds us of this prescription. It’s not natural for most of us to notice what we like about our life or what we like about others, especially if we unconsciously use turmoil to stimulate our prefrontal cortex. Focusing on the negative aspects of others or of your own life makes you more vulnerable to depression and can damage your relationships.

A group of researchers at Duke showed that in rats, nicotine exposure during adolescence damaged the pathways producing serotonin in the brain. As a result, there was less serotonin, and as serotonin deficiency is one of the leading mechanisms of depression, that may explain why depression is more frequent in people who have been heavy smokers as teens.

Milan and colleagues41 examined adolescents' experiences with their own parents, finding that adolescents who perceived their mothers as more unavailable and their fathers as both more unavailable and more hostile experienced more depression

Percent of adolescents aged 12–17 who had at least one major depressive episode in the past year. Rates have been rising since 2011, especially for girls. (Source: Data from National Survey on Drug Use and Health.)

When we talk about pressure, perfectionism, anxiety, depression, and loneliness in kids, what we are really talking about is an unmet need to feel valued unconditionally, away from the trophies, the acceptance letters, the likes, and the accolades. When we say that “pressure” is detrimental to children’s (and parents’) well-being, what we mean by “pressure” is a set of circumstances that cause our children to wrongfully perceive their value as contingent on achievement. When an adolescent believes they must sustain a certain level of success in order to earn their parents’ love and affection, they feel inadequate, and this interferes with a healthy, stable identity.

It’s not just depression—it’s atypical depression. Who would have thought they have a name to describe what is happening to me, and one that pinpoints my symptoms so precisely? In the book Understanding Depression, Donald F. Klein, M.D., and Paul H. Wender, M.D., characterize atypical depressives as people who “respond positively to good things that happen to them, are able to enjoy simple pleasures like food and sex, and tend to oversleep and overeat. Their depression, which is chronic rather than periodic and which usually dates from adolescence, largely shows itself in lack of energy and interest, lack of initiative, and a great sensitivity to periodic—particularly romantic—rejection.

…adolescence is not necessarily an especially stressful time. Rather, it is a time when the brain is more vulnerable to the effects of sustained stressors, which can tilt the adolescent into mental disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder, depression, eating disorders, and substance abuse.

At age twenty-six, I feel like I am finally going through adolescence.

Clinical psychologist | Clinical Psychology services calgary | McAtee Psychology Gavin is a registered psychologist with over ten years of experience providing professional therapy and assessment services to children and teenagers along with couples & families. Gavin will help you gain clarity and move consciously towards what's truly important and meaningful to you and your family. Gavin's mission is to help you gain the knowledge you need to set goals, find solutions, and move towards actions that help you achieve a rich, meaningful, and full life. Gavin' expertise includes the following: - Relationship Issues (Couples & Family Therapy) - Children and Adolescent Issues - Parent Consultation & Strategies - Mood Disorders (Stress, Depression, Anxiety) - Developmental Disorders (e.g., ADHD, ASD) Working Phone No: 403 926 3738

The first hints of this emerged in the early and mid-1990s, at the tail end of the crack epidemic. Suniya Luthar is now sixty-two, with an infectious smile, bright brown eyes, and short snow-white hair. Back then, she was a fledgling psychologist working as an assistant professor and researcher in the department of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. She was studying resiliency among teenagers in low-income urban communities, and one of her early findings was that the most popular kids were also among the most destructive and aggressive at school. Was this a demographic phenomenon, she wondered, or merely an adolescent one, this tendency to look up to peers who acted out? To find out, she needed a comparison group. A research assistant suggested they recruit students from his former high school in an affluent suburb. Luthar’s team ultimately enlisted 488 tenth graders—about half from her assistant’s high school and half from a scruffy urban high school. The affluent community’s median household income was 80 percent higher than the national median, and more than twice that of the low-income community. The rich community also had far fewer families on food stamps (0.3 percent vs. 19 percent) and fewer kids getting free or reduced-price school lunches (1 percent vs. 86 percent). The suburban teens were 82 percent white, while the urban teens were 87 percent nonwhite. Luthar surveyed the kids, asking a series of questions related to depression and anxiety, drug use ranging from alcohol and nicotine to LSD and cocaine, and participation in delinquent acts at home, at school, and in the community. Also examined were grades, “social competence,” and teachers’ assessments of each student. After crunching the numbers, she was floored. The affluent teens fared poorly relative to the low-income teens on “all indicators of substance use, including hard drugs.” This flipped the conventional wisdom on its head. “I was quite taken aback,” Luthar recalls.

Forced by the hand of early school start times, this state of chronic sleep deprivation is especially concerning considering that adolescence is the most susceptible phase of life for developing chronic mental illnesses, such as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and suicidality. Unnecessarily bankrupting the sleep of a teenager could make all the difference in the precarious tipping point between psychological wellness and lifelong psychiatric illness.

Deborah C Weisberg is a Marriage & Family Therapist , LMFT, LPCC, and is based out of Los Angeles, California, United States. Deborah specializes in the counseling of Grief, Relationship Issues, Anxiety, etc. The therapist has experience in handling cases of Anger Management, Behavioral Issues, Bipolar Disorder, Borderline Personality, Career Counseling, Child or Adolescent, Codependency, Depression, Divorce, Domestic Violence, Emotional Disturbance, Family Conflict, Infidelity, Marital and Premarital, Men's Issues, Narcissistic Personality, Parenting, Peer Relationships, Self Esteem, Suicidal Ideation, Transgender, Trauma and PTSD, Women's Issues, and more.

the spike in environmental alarmism comes at a time when anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising within the general population, especially among adolescents, in both the United States and Europe.67 Seventy percent of American teenagers call anxiety and depression a major problem.68

Austin Trauma Therapy Center offers inclusive therapy for all people! We offer: EMDR, DBT, Depression, Anxiety, PTSD treatment, etc. We provide child, adolescent, adult, couples, and family counseling services.

I do not blame myself for running from those feelings. No one would deliberately subject himself to the discomfort I carried inside my skin unless he had a very good reason to. As a little boy fleeing into the streets and waiting neighborhood games, as an adolescent fleeing toward drugs that soothed me like a mother, I have taken flight throughout most of my life. Hurt, grandiose, blaming others for not filling me up, I was in search of the next big fix, in search of love without having the skills to love well in return. Like Perceval, I have spent a good portion of my life wandering, searching for the right question.

Chemically induced joy comes at a cost. That cost can be high. Very, very high. So high that you’re going to think twice after reading what science has to say about drug use. One study found that adolescents who smoke just a couple of joints of marijuana show changes in their brains. That’s not a couple of years of smoking or the decades that some adults rack up. It’s just two joints. A research team led by Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, a professor and psychiatrist at the McGill University Health Center in Montreal, discovered that teenagers using cannabis had a nearly 40% greater risk of depression and a 50% greater risk of suicidal ideation in adulthood. Dr. Gobbi stated that “given the large number of adolescents who smoke cannabis, the risk in the population becomes very big. About 7% of depression is probably linked to the use of cannabis in adolescence, which translates into more than 400,000 cases.” The research that revealed these startling numbers was not just a single study of adolescent marijuana use. It was a meta-analysis and review of 11 studies with a total of 23,317 teenage subjects followed through young adulthood. Further, Gobbi’s team only reviewed studies that provided information on depression in the subjects prior to their cannabis use. “We considered only studies that controlled for [preexisting] depression,” said Dr. Gobbi. “They were not depressed before using marijuana, so they probably weren’t using it to self-medicate.” Marijuana use preceded depression. The specific findings of Gobbi’s research include: The risk of depression associated with marijuana use in teens below age 18 is 1.4 times higher than among nonusers. The risk of suicidal thoughts is 1.5 times higher. The likelihood that teen marijuana users will attempt suicide is 3.46 times greater. In adults with prolonged marijuana use, the wiring of the brain degrades. Areas affected include the hippocampus (learning and memory), insula (compassion), and prefrontal cortex (executive functions). The authors of one study stated that “regular cannabis use is associated with gray matter volume reduction in the medial temporal cortex, temporal pole, parahippocampal gyrus, insula, and orbitofrontal cortex; these regions are rich in cannabinoid CB1 receptors and functionally associated with motivational, emotional, and affective processing. Furthermore, these changes correlate with the frequency of cannabis use . . . [while the] . . . age of onset of drug use also influences the magnitude of these changes.” A large number of studies show that cannabis use both increases anxiety and depression and leads to worse health. Key parts of your brain shrink more, based on how early you began smoking weed, and how often you smoke it. That’s a “high” price to pay.

Natural Ways to Help Depression Depression is not one illness. Like anxiety, the pandemic spawned a whole new level of people being diagnosed with depression and placed on antidepressant medication, without ever getting a proper evaluation or trying simple fixes. Here are nine common things I do for patients before prescribing antidepressant medication. 1. Check for and (if necessary) correct thyroid hormone abnormalities. 2. Work with a nutritionally informed physician to optimize your folate, vitamin B12, vitamin D, homocysteine, and omega-3 fatty acids. I’m convinced that without doing these nutritional fixes, patients are less likely to respond to the medications. 3. Try an elimination diet for three weeks. 4. Add colorful fruits and vegetables into your diet. 5. Eliminate the ANTs (automatic negative thoughts). See days 22, 116–117. 6. Exercise—walk like you are late for 45 minutes four times a week. This has been found to be as effective as antidepressant medication.[1] 7. Add one of the following supplements to your daily routine: Saffron 30 mg/day; curcumin, not as turmeric root but as Longvida, which is much more efficiently absorbed; zinc as citrate or glycinate 30 mg (tolerable upper level is 40 mg/day for adults, 34 mg/day for adolescents, less for younger kids); or magnesium glycinate, citrate, or malate, 100–500 mg with 30 mg of vitamin B6. 8. Consume probiotics daily. 9. Try morning bright light therapy with a therapeutic lamp of 10,000 lux for 20–30 minutes. If someone comes to me with depression, I order screening labs, teach them not to believe every negative thought they have, give them basic supplements (saffron, zinc, curcumins, and omega-3s), and encourage them to exercise. Many people never need medication if they follow through with the program. If the above interventions are ineffective, I’ll try other nutraceuticals or medications targeted to their specific type of depression (take the test at brainhealthassessment.com).

Depression in children, adolescents, and young adults is increasing as well. From 2006 to 2917, rates of depression the US increased by 68 percent in children ages twelve to seventeen. In people ages eighteen to twenty-five, there was an increase of 49 percent. For adults over the age of twenty-five, the rate of depression supposedly stayed stable.

On the other hand, when we are chronically made to feel like we don’t matter, when we are abused, ignored, or made to feel marginalized, we can behave in ways that force others to take notice of us—whether that’s obsessing over a perfect image, overworking, developing an eating disorder, or acting out in extreme ways (a school shooter being among the most visible and tragic examples). A lack of mattering is a strong predictor of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicide. When we don’t feel like we matter, we can turn inward: we give up, drink to escape, and even self-harm. People low on mattering tend to overgeneralize and catastrophize their thoughts, said Flett, convincing themselves that they don’t matter now and will never matter in the future. Flett’s research suggests that as many as one-third of adolescents in the United States and Canada do not believe they matter to others in their communities.

Studies have repeatedly shown that children, adolescents, and adults who have a strong external locus of control are predisposed to anxiety and depression—they become anxious because they believe they have little or no control over their fate, and they become depressed when this sense of helplessness gets to be too great.

She had run away from her group home at five o’clock on Saturday, gone to a place in Boston where druggies hang out, smoked some dope and done some other drugs, and then left with a bunch of boys in a car. At five o’clock Sunday morning they had gang-raped her. Like so many of the adolescents we see, Ayesha can’t articulate what she wants or needs and can’t think through how she might protect herself. Instead, she lives in a world of actions. Trying to explain her behavior in terms of victim/perpetrator isn’t helpful, nor are labels like “depression,

My adolescent years were convoluted with ideas that chaos was good, that depression meant you were a creative person. My heroes were Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Nancy Spungen. Sylvia fucking Plath… playing Russian roulette with various dicks to make a point that I just didn’t fucking care. I was a mess. I was interesting.

Of course, if adolescents are ready to take on the world—and make babies and sustain the species—it’s no surprise they’re surly and awful to be around when we treat them like little children today. The disconnect between “I’m grown up!” and “You’re grounded” is just too great. One study found that the peak year for depression among American women is eighteen. They’re ready to start out but can’t get started.

Forced by the hand of early school start times, this state of chronic sleep deprivation is especially concerning considering that adolescence is the most susceptible phase of life for developing chronic mental illnesses, such as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and suicidality. Unnecessarily bankrupting the sleep of a teenager could make all the difference in the precarious tipping point between psychological wellness and lifelong psychiatric illness. This is a strong statement, and I do not write it flippantly or without evidence.

Such denial is facile, but the statistics suggest that any teenage suicide attempt should be taken seriously: only about 2 percent of children try to kill themselves, which shows that it is hardly a normal adolescent act. Indeed, 90 percent of children who attempt suicide have a psychiatric disorder, most commonly clinical depression.

Yet if Diana’s later recollections were an authentic gauge of her mood in 1980 and early 1981, she felt intense resentment, anger, fear, depression, and jealousy behind her expressions of affection. Diana needed to be consoled and cared for, and had she felt secure, her disquieting undercurrents might have subsided. But life with the royal family behind palace walls only offered the illusion of protection. Diana was an emotionally bruised adolescent without a clear identity, and royal life, with its rigid protocol and fishbowl confines, would become a source of anxiety rather than a safe haven.

After eleven weeks, the investigation of the shooter was officially closed. The manifesto he’d written had told them everything, particularly who he hated and why. It was a list depressing in its banality, in its adolescent conviction that he’d discovered some grand truth about how people are phonies, how organized religion corrupts, how the world is mostly about pain. As if we didn’t all know this, as if we also weren’t trying to find ways to deal with it that didn’t involve murder.

Adolescents and adults with bipolar disorder who received the skills taught as part of FFT had fewer mood episodes, longer periods of feeling well, and greater improvements in depressive symptoms compared to bipolar individuals who did not receive FFT (Miklowitz et al. 2000)

When we discovered that a low sense of control is enormously stressful and that autonomy is key to developing motivation,1 we thought we were onto something important. This impression was confirmed when we started to probe deeper and found that a healthy sense of control is related to virtually everything we want for our children, including physical and mental health, academic success, and happiness. From 1960 until 2002, high school and college students have steadily reported lower and lower levels of internal locus of control (the belief that they can control their own destiny) and higher levels of external locus of control (the belief that their destiny is determined by external forces). This change has been associated with an increased vulnerability to anxiety and depression. In fact, adolescents and young adults today are five to eight times more likely to experience the symptoms of an anxiety disorder than young people were at earlier times, including during the Great Depression, World War II, and the cold war.

Grinker interviewed them each personally and repeatedly over two years, and gradually assembled a detailed list of ingredients that make for mental health. THE STUDENTS at George Williams College had been active in their local YMCA, and their connections to that organization, their church, and their communities were long and deep. “Uncertainty about the future is minimal,” Grinker noted, among these “upright young men.” They came from white- and blue-collar families in the Midwest. They had slightly above average IQs, average college grades (mostly C’s), and no childhood or adolescent conflicts with their families. Two-thirds said they had been disciplined firmly by their parents, with well-established boundaries for conduct, but they saw these constraints as beneficial and reasonable. Except for four people with abnormal mood states (two with hypomania and two with depression), two stutterers, two people who displayed paranoid thinking, and one person with recurrent nightmares, the great majority (85 percent) lacked even the mildest mental abnormality. Grinker noted that though the subjects enjoyed team sports in high school, “only sometimes did one claim to be the leader of a social, work, or sport group.” These men were better designed to be followers than leaders: “The average subject has had practically no trouble with those in authority” and even “maintains that he would abide by rules which he considered to be unfair.” Overall there is a “picture of an individual who would be submissive to authority, but not slavishly.” Searching for a term less loaded than “normal” to describe these people, Grinker called them homoclites, a Latinate term he invented to indicate “those who follow a common rule.

Psychologists who study peer influence ask what it is about teenage girls that makes them so susceptible to peer contagion and so good at spreading it. Many believe it has something to do with the way girls tend to socialize.35 “When we listen to girls versus boys talk to each other, girls are much more likely to reply with statements that are validating and supportive than questioning,” Amanda Rose, professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, told me. “They’re willing to suspend reality to get into their friends’ worlds more. For this reason, adolescent girls are more likely to take on, for instance, the depression their friends are going through and become depressed themselves.” This

I love you, and I promise you I will support any reasonable endeavor you ever embark upon. But we are talking about twenty-five thousand dollars. Twenty-five thousand. And you have proven yourself to be a good man and a good son. But right now, you are a very poor investment.

There’s something else. Nora drops her chin, embarrassed by what she’s about to confess: “I’ve noticed with a lot of people who’ll use their mental issues—it’s almost like a conversation piece. It’s almost like a trend.” I reassure her that she’s at least the twelfth adolescent to tell me this. She exhales. What’s it like to have so many friends suffering with anxiety disorders and depression? Actually, she tells me, those who don’t have a diagnosis feel left out. “You’re expected to have these mental issues. And these things that are being normalized—these things are not normal,” she says. “I’m surrounded by it, so I think that in some ways, it has become our new normal. How is it possible, with all that around me, for it not also to be inflicted on me—for me not to be depressed about it?