"You and the World" Teen Depression Continued

Posted by Jasmin Gilliam in English 1 - Dunn on

Since my first blog post,"You and the World" Teen Depression, I have found out that more teenagers are depressed than I thought. The statistics have sown outstanding numbers. On this site the numbers are plain and simple and that is only in the girls! Some of the things that they mention on the page are that the number of female that are depressed triples from the age 12 to 15. At 16 it still increases by almost a whole percentage. Then when the girls at different went to get help with their depression there was an ten percent difference between the girls that were 12 and the girls at the age of 17. I also found out that it takes about a month to get an appointment for help with your depression. Then when you are prescribed with depression meds it takes another month for them to work or even have any effect on you. I learned that many teens know many others or are those others that have gone through some form of depression. Most doing things such as cutting.

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Screen Shot 2013-01-21 at 3.36.49 PM
​​These are the charts on the site mentioned before.

To add to my research I created a small survey. The survey asked questions like Have you or anyone you know gone through depression? Did you try to seek help for yourself or your friend? What did you try to do? If you have been depressed or know someone who was depressed did they do self harm? What kind of self harm? To take the survey yourself you can go to this address. I also interviewed a friend of mine who I knew went through some things that caused her to go to some drastic measures with herself. In the interview I asked some of the same questions as in the survey and let her tell her amazing story.
​Like I said before this made me realize that more teens are depressed than I thought. When my interviewee was telling her story she said her best friend was someone who also had problems of her own. Her friend instead of telling her that this may ruin her life or even urge her not to do it, never told her anything to stop her or even anything about her own experience with the issue. My interviewee thought that this was very confusing and she never got why her friend didn't tell her anything. She had confided in this friend and told her everything and she didn't try to help her. Another thing that I found out was that bullying is a HUGE part of teen depression. When she was in the eighth grade my friend got bullied and two words stuck with her until high school those words were “loser” and “fat”. One thing that she truly thought was that the things were homologous. She thought that if she got to be skinny then she would be popular and if she was popular then she automatically would become skinny. That is all that was on her mind then, to become the most liked person in her school. I learned that depression has many side effects. Some being harmful to your physical body like cutting, burning, scratching, starving, drugs smoking and the list goes on. Some being mental. I did not realize how horrible your mind can get messed up from other people’s untrue words.
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Screen Shot 2013-01-21 at 6.47.40 PM
This is an original piece of art. The idea came from the old bullying commercials. The words that are around her neck are in the shape of a person's hand. the hand is choking and hurting her. it represents how the words make her feel and how they affect her emotionally. the words on her arm are words that she cut into herself. you may notice that they are the same words that my friend was told most and didn't like most. That is because she inspired me.

Now that I have my research I can honestly say that if you know someone going through any form of depression then you should get them help or even help them yourself. my friend is now clean for over six months and that is because she got the help that she needed. If I were to say anything all I would say is help. The thing about people who are depressed though is that they don’t want to help all the time so it can be hard to get them the things they need, I know that but you still need to try. Talking about their feelings is actually good for them and all you have to do is be there to listen. It is very hard to help someone who is in that state of mind but you have to go through with it.
​I still wonder why the girls are the main teens who are depressed. I wonder if it is because of the monthly or just the fact that we are girls and we show our emotions more that we are more likely to get depressed. Another theory is that maybe girls like to show their emotions more, so we find out about the girls rather than the guys. Guys don’t like to show their emotions so they never really get noticed when they do the same things that the girls may do, maybe even worse stuff since they bottle up their emotions. Now this may be getting a bit on the stereotypical side but for many cases this is the case. Even when you search anything simalar to “Teen depression” or “Depression in teens” most of the sites are geared towards the teens statistics in the females rather than the males.
For my agent of change part for Blog #3 I am thinking of doing a box or a posting of something for anyone to give in a submission for what they might be going through and I can reply to them with advice. I will need the help of someone who more experienced in this field of work to help me with what advice to give. In what they write to me they will write how I should get back to them whether it be via email, in their locker, or to a teacher however they want me to get back to them I will do that.

Thanks for reading guys! see you on the next blog post.


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