Depressed Teens: Why They Don’t Get Help
Adolescence is a life stage where a person is faced with many challenges. This is a time when rapid physical development happens and teens become deeply emotionally involved. Though these changes are exciting, it can also be confusing and uncomfortable to both the parent and the child.
The Strive for Independence
Attaining independence is one of the things that adolescents want to achieve. This is often a source of conflict between the parents and the teenager. You, the teenager would like to do things on your own, to go your own way. Your parents, who know better, do not allow you to do so. They always want to know where you are going, what you are going to do, and the people you’re going out with. They want to know everything, but you don’t want to tell them anything. Because you don’t want them to interfere with your life, you don’t tell them how you are feeling. You don’t want them fussing over you and you would better keep things to yourself.
Because you don’t want your parents to be looking out for you all the time, you would isolate yourself from them, and often would defy their wishes. This would be the beginning of parental conflicts. These conflicts are also one of the reasons why teens don’t open up to their parents when they have problems such as depression.
As a teenager, you would think that you can deal with whatever happens to you on your own. You don’t need the help of other people, neither your friends nor your parents. Though this is a good character trait that you should develop, when serious things are at hand, do not just handle these on your own. There are things you can do alone and there are always the things that you cannot.
Depression is not supposed to be handled personally. Part of the therapy is that you deal with depression on your own personal way. But before that, you should ask the help of other people such as your friends and parents. You can then go into treatment to alleviate the symptoms that you have.
The Fear of Being thought of as Not Normal
For teens, medical and other types of disorders are often thought of as abnormal because not everybody experiences such. These disorders then are being kept from other people so that they will not learn of it.
For depressed teens, they don’t like to get help from other people because they fear that these people might think of them as abnormal. These things are big concerns for teens since they always want to look good and they would not like to change their appearances. Teens have fears of changes that might happen to their looks such as the presence of pimples, and other stuff. Included with these fears are the psychological issues such as being branded as abnormal because you are feeling depressed. Being called with the term abnormal has a great impact on the self-esteem of a teenager. This will be taken deeply, and it would hurt the ego too much. This is why teens don’t report feeling depressed because of this fear.
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