Anxiety And Depression Are Affecting Us

Voice From the Next Generation

Jan. 29, 2016

You feel alone. Utterly and completely alone. Nothing makes you happy anymore. Life seems dulled. Your favorite food has lost its taste and your favorite color has lost its brightness.

The love you once felt for your family, friends, significant other, has vanished. Just waking up in the morning is hard. Sometimes when you get home after a long day, you cry, feeling so suffocated, drowning in every failure you’ve ever committed. You look at the world around you and only see hopelessness, only see what you’ll never accomplish.

This is how 10–15 percent of all teenagers feel every day. According to I Need a Lighthouse, a depression and suicide awareness program, approximately 20 percent of teens experience depression before they reach adulthood. I have never had to deal with this reality, but many of my friends have. I have had to consult some of my favorite people in the world, watch as they struggled with this pain and try to understand what they are going through.

It never used to be like this. Teens weren’t suffering through depression and anxiety as much as they do today. According to Young Minds, U.K.’s leading charity for children’s mental health and well-being, the number of people aged 15–16 with depression nearly doubled between the 1980s and 2000s. Here locally, Tamara Kolodziej, Petoskey high school counselor, has noticed this trend, noting, "Over the course of the last 5 to 10 years I have noticed an increase in student’s self-reporting increased stress levels and know that many more are not telling us."

And I don’t think it’s the fault of the teens. Since kindergarten, our parents and the school system have forced the concept of graduating high school and going to college. Peter Loomis, Petoskey high school senior, shared his view on this, saying, "Due to the increased requirements to get a job, you need a higher education. So, as students, we stress ourselves out over where we will go to college and whether we will get in with our GPA, ACT score or even extra-curricular activities."

Every student has had to make a plan. Since 6th grade, the school system has asked us what we want to be, where we will go. They have forced us to choose a college and a career path since we were 12. And with that they have given us anxiety for our future. Students are popping Adderall to get a good score on the ACT and crying for hours when they don’t get an A on their AP test. The months of college applications is spent in ultimate stress, unable to breathe or think of anything else, so worried about not being accepted. Not going to college never seemed like an option for us. So we build up this stress since we are children, afraid that we aren’t good enough to make it.

As Peter said, just having good grades isn’t enough for high school students; you also have to play sports, have a social life, take college courses, and participate in school clubs. This leaves many teens with the feeling of inadequacy. Nothing is ever enough; there’s always more you should do, more the other person does and not enough time to try. These higher expectations leave teens overworking themselves, over-stressing themselves, and in some cases these expectations can create serious anxiety. Teens are vulnerable to these high levels of stress, working so hard for success, that when failure and too much workload come, they can’t handle it. Adolescents are still growing, their brains not quite developed, so many do end up with anxiety or depression over the stress and total feeling of inadequacy.

For the longest time, depression was a forbidden subject said in hushed tones. To those who didn’t know what it was, this created an aura of mystery. Tumblr and other social media sites have grasped onto this, making depression into a glorified thing of art and beauty.

One Petoskey senior who has battled with anxiety and depression agrees. "I feel like social media sites such as Tumblr have idolized anxiety and depression and made it into this beautiful and artful thing that it isn’t," they said. "Nothing is beautiful about panic attacks and cutting and not eating for days and hating yourself and I think people get wrapped up in the mystery of being depressed because so many people aren’t open about it." These sites are creating a false image of what depression is, making young teens want to feel the pain that is made to appear so artfully beautiful.

Depression isn’t something to be desired or be made striking by a photo with a hundred thousand notes on Tumblr. It’s something teens should be educated about from a young age, and something that those who have it shouldn’t feel ashamed of. By making this disorder desirable on social media, teens aren’t learning what it really is and how it can affect them.

Teenagers go through a variety of things every day that give them more than enough reason to have anxiety or depression. We are pressured to go to college without even thinking for ourselves first, social media tells us lies about what these disorders really are, and expectations of what it means to be a student have drastically increased. As the years have passed and changed, so has the life of a teenager and the burdens that come with it.

Jillian McCreery-Piotrowski is a senior at Petoskey High School. She is involved in Distributive Education Clubs of America (DECA), Model United Nations and plays varsity basketball.