Social and Other Impacts of Teenage Depression
Teenage depression can cause you to have a lot of impairments in all aspects of you life – psychological, mental, emotional, and behavioral.
Social Effects
Because of the lack of self-esteem in a depressed teen, this may result to you withdrawing yourself from other people especially your parents, your teachers and your friends. Instead of reaching out to them, you may feel like what you are feeling is abnormal and you will just be ridiculed when you will inform them of your problems. You may begin to start hanging out with other people, keeping yourself away from your old friends. One big problem here is that you might go away from what is society friendly activities and would engage yourself in risky behaviors.
Because you feel worthless due to you having low self-esteem, this may lead you to become overly sensitive with criticisms given to you by other people. Instead of learning from what they say, you will take these against them and would consider these as negative things they say to destroy you and your reputation.
Behavioral Effects
Teenage depression can cause a person to be emotionally unstable. There are times that you feel sad and melancholic and after a few minutes, you are there happily smiling and laughing. Though this is a normal part of being a teenager, when this persists, it calls for attention already. This is hardly a normal behavior for a teenager. This warrants further evaluation from a physician to check for possible teenage depression.
Other behavioral effects of teenage depression are unreasonable irritability, being enraged over simple things and constant feelings of anger and hostility. These are alarming behaviors since these become unreasonable.
School problems are often encountered by depressed teens. Because of lack of energy and difficulty in concentrating, a depressed teen may lose interest in school activities. This may lead to poor grades, poor attendance, and for students who previously excelled with their school works, frustration.
Running away from home is also a behavioral effect. This may also be coupled with reckless behaviors such as substance abuse, reckless driving, unprotected sex, uncontrolled drinking, violence and sometimes, self-injury. These behaviors are actually a cry for help and if goes unnoticed and treated, would result to further problems.
Psychological Effects
Low self-esteem is the most common problem associated with teenage depression. Teenagers who are depressed are often the people who have low self-esteem. Moreover, depression triggers and intensifies this feeling. Your feelings of ugliness, failure, unworthiness, and shame will be worsened when you have depression. This will cause you to lose your interest with all the activities which you previously found enjoyable.
Eating disorders may be developed during depression. Anorexia is getting hungry, with eating only a little amount of food for the day. Bulimia on the other hand is eating every food you set your eyes on and then purging right after eating. Other eating disorders developed can be binge eating and yo-yo dieting. These are signs of unrecognized depression and when left at that state, can result to worse problems such as malnutrition and medical disorders such as peptic ulcer disease.
Adolescents who are depressed often think, speak, or make attention-seeking behaviors about suicide. They often exhibit signs and symptoms that they want to commit suicide. These signs should be taken seriously for depressed individuals are the most common people who commit suicide.
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