Article Day!

For this assignment, I went ahead and read through the article titled the depressed child. With all my interviews coming up, I had to do some more research when looking into my interviews. I found out that many of them did teen and younger therapy. They did adult too but focused on children, which made me wonder and look into an article about health issues in our youth. Only to find out that around “5 percent of children and adolescents in the general population suffer from depression at any given point in time” (Families page 1). When finding this out, I started looking for more information on why our youth is becoming depressed and so fast and even so young. As I kept reading, I found out more hard truths about why our young kids form mental health issues. It goes on to says that “ if one or more of these signs of depression persist, parents should seek help: frequent sadness, tearfulness, crying, decreased interest in activities; or inability to enjoy… favorite activities, hopelessness, low energy persistent boredom; social isolation, poor communication, low self- esteem and guilt, extreme sensitivity to rejection or failure, increased irritability, anger, or hostility, difficulty with relationships, frequent complaints of physical illnesses such as headaches and stomachaches, frequent absences from school or poor performance in school, poor concentration, a major change in eating/and sleeping patterns, talk of or efforts to run away Bauer 2 from home, thoughts or expressions of suicide or self-destructive behavior” (Families page 1). When reading through, It made me wonder, have I done any of these? Have my friends done any of these, my family? When I kept thinking about it, the more I started to realize that, in my opinion, most people go through a hard time resulting in either a long-term or short mental health issue. I then started to ask my family and close friends and soon saw that most have but did not want to talk about it with anyone because they were impressed. Since then, I got a strong feeling that I wanted to write my next paper over breaking down the wall between being scared to talk about mental health. It is a very private matter, but we do need to start breaking down those ways. The sooner we do that as a whole and community, then sooner those cases will go down, not just for kids but for all people. Therefore, I believe that with the research I read, I think the biggest thing we are fighting against is breaking down the wall between communicating and seeking help. When we fix that, in my opinion, the cases of death and mental health as a whole will soon fall with it. And hopefully if we teach our youth, it will get fixed for generations to come and come because it all starts with our young and training them because the older you get, the harder it is to teach a person all new rules and outlooks on life