Depression Among Teens!

Tamanna Patel

Psychology 1A

22 September 2014

Depression Among Teens!

What is depression? Depression is described as a unhappy, miserable, and in in the dumps, it comes and goes for short periods of time. In an research done by WWW. Pschcentral.com/library, they estimated about ten to fifteen percent of teens are depressed at any given time specially after entering high school, one in every four teenagers will experience in having an episode of major depression during there high school years at an average age of 14. They last almost about a couple months (untreated). When getting treated they have 2 common options to approach there illness; they can get put on anti-depressants or be put at a psych unit. In the research by food and drug administration they researched that adolescents who take the drug (anti- depressants) about four percent commit suicide. This is proven by depression can start from the core of high school peer pressure or cyber bullying. In my theory depression among teens becomes a trend for teenagers, they usually say, “I’m depressed” or “I have depression”. While I was observing at Kaiser Permanente pediatrics psych unit, most teen’s girls are the ones that are mostly depressed. They sometime are depressed over boy drama.  Most teens girls that are diagnosed with depression were on anti-depressants or were put into the hospital several times for wanting to kill themselves by cutting, jumping of a cliff, or even trying to burn themselves.  When they are depressed they known not to do so well in school. They are known to make mistakes by taking out there anger. In my observation I watched four teens three girls one boy who all were diagnosed with depression and were all in different stages of depression. Of the four teens I was concerned by their stage and the 2 of the four were meeting the heavily depressed stage and the other two were not depressed just shocked! One of the teens was hospitalized several times an the others were put on pills. Looking all these teens that came into the office they were given diagnoses by there parents for a health professional even said anything to the family.
Hypothesis:

In order to make an accurate testing method at Kaiser, I need to find out how many teens abuse the meaning of depression as defined above with a misconception of feeling sad and being medically depressed. Sometimes while coming into the office teens are diagnosing themselves by telling the doctor they are depressed. In order to put my theory to test I would have of ask the doctor to put the teens on observation and see which are really depressed and which ones are sad or in shock.

While being a nursing assistant and hospice aid in my scope of practice I have seen that many teens that have a sudden loss in their family or they have a sudden diagnosed disease they are in shock.  The misinterpretation of depression would make you think the percent would become less after you put teens on observation but actually through a study the medication given out was still the same. If my theory failed then I would know more teens are depressed. But, if my prediction was true then I would know that depression is overly diagnosed and among teens.