Teenage Depression In Adolescents

In 2013 virginia teens were surveyed: 6,815 were in a physical fight, 6,910 did not go to school because they felt unsafe, 6,874 were bullied at school. That is a lot of teens and of course many precautions are set to protect and help kids in these situations. However what about protecting teens from thoughts and feelings they can not control by themselves? 6,854 felt sad or hopeless, 6,857 made a plan to attempt suicide, 5,900 attempted suicide that resulted in medical care. Many people think the best way to treat depression in teenagers is by medication but, yet antidepressants can cause suicidal thoughts and is only most effective when used with other treatments. Therefore we should take teenage depression more serious and must, need a therapy …show more content…
“youth perceived as being depressed have been prescribed medication in growing numbers during the past decade, even though some recent polls reveal that most physicians do not consider themselves qualified to identify or treat depression in children and adolescents.” My conclusion, then, is that if they do not feel qualified to diagnose a teen with depression they should not have the power to prescribe antidepressants. Doctors that do not know how to identify depression diagnisioning teens will lead to many teens being misdiagnosed. My point is then that teens will have to endure side effects of a drug they might actually not need. Teenagers go through normal emotional problems during puberty and this is mistakenly seen as depression. By the way, if giving out medication was the only treatment for depression than then every teen could be given antidepressants. Treatment for depression used to be exercise and therapy until drugs came along. Since then the number of people diagnosed as depressed has gone up and so has the number of suicides in teen. Essentially, I am arguing that if when treatment for depression was not antidepressants and the suicide rate was lower then why is medication still prescribed to teens more than anything else. It 's not healthy to be treating teens with drugs when doctors aren 't even sure if they are needed. My point is that …show more content…
The effects on teens can impact them more in a negative way than positive. “Many psychiatrists acknowledge that not much is known about the impact that antidepressants have on the developing brains of children and teenagers.” To put it another way, they give teens drugs that are not only addicting and leading to suicidal thoughts but they also don 't know what serious brain damage will happen to the teens on the antidepressants. They may be helping with their depression but if they are killing brain cells or stopping growth they are not the best thing for them. Another problem with giving teens antidepressants is that, Antidepressants have been said to cause suicidal thoughts. Although some people may argue that no tests have ever demonstrated a direct link between youth antidepressant use and suicide, I would answer that there is no correct way to diagnose teens with depression. To further explain if a non depressed teen is given an antidepressant it 's not going to do anything to them. In sum, then, without having a fundamental way of knowing if a teen is depressed then all test results will be inaccurate because some teens in the test may not really have depression. “A few years ago, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued warnings that children and teens who took a common kind of antidepressant might experience suicidal thoughts.” This warning from the Food and Drug