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Cora Bent

Lisa Cook

English 1201.B55

15 July 2020

Depression and Anxiety in Teenagers

Teenagers all over the world struggle with their mental health. Some have depression,

some have anxiety, and some even have both. Diagnosis of severe depression and anxiety is

becoming a much bigger problem among teens than it was with previous generations. In June

2020, the CDC has stated, “7.1% of children aged 3-17 years (approximately 4.4 million) have

diagnosed anxiety . . . 3.2% of children aged 3-17 years (approximately 1.9 million) have

diagnosed depression” (“Data and Statistics on Children's Mental Health”). They went on to say,

“Having another disorder is most common in children with depression: about 3 in 4 children

aged 3-17 with depression also have anxiety (73.8%)” (“Data and Statistics on Children's Mental

Health”). What causes depression and anxiety is not exactly straightforward, as there are a

plethora of things that can lead to these mental disorders. However, in teenagers, multiple things

can lead to depression. In today’s age, things such as academic expectations, school shooting

fears, social media, and peer pressure cause teens to develop self-esteem issues and unrealistic

expectations of how they should look, act, and learn, thus leading to depression and anxiety.

In “Teen Depression” written by The Mayo Clinic Staff, they describe depression as “a

serious health problem that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and lack of interest in

activities” (Mayo Clinic Staff). Contrary to popular belief, depression is more than just feeling

sad sometimes. Symptoms can include feelings of hopelessness, irritable moods, suicidal
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thoughts/attempts, crying spells for no good reason, etc. Those with depression also tend to

isolate themselves from people, self-harm, turn to drugs and alcohol, sleep too much or too little,

and more (Mayo Clinic Staff). Seasonal Affective Disorder, often called Seasonal Depression, is

one of the many types of depression. This is when a person feels the symptoms of depression

during the winter months, mostly because there is less sunlight than the rest of the year and

sunlight can help you feel less depressed.

Like depression, some people have a false sense of what anxiety is. The National Institute of

Mental Health states, “For a person with an anxiety disorder, the anxiety does not go away and

can get worse over time. The symptoms can interfere with daily activities such as job

performance, school work, and relationships” (“Anxiety Disorders”). Like depression, some

people have a false sense of what anxiety is. Many people think anxiety is purely shyness in

social situations, but that is not always the case. There is not only one type of anxiety, are many

different types, While social anxiety is one of those types, it is a lot more than being shy. For

example, some symptoms of social anxiety include having an intense fear of social situations,

avoiding social situations, and overly worrying that certain behaviors in social settings will lead

to being judged negatively by people around them (“Anxiety Disorders”). The most common

anxiety disorder is called Generalized Anxiety Disorder, which has symptoms such as extreme

restlessness, having trouble concentrating, difficulty controlling your worry, being irritable

easily, etc. (“Anxiety Disorders”).

While many things lead up to depression, general causes include inherited traits,

hormones, and brain chemistry (Mayo Clinic Staff). For example, the brain of a depressed person

looks significantly different than a person without depression. Harvard Health Publishing says,
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“Research shows that the hippocampus is smaller in some depressed people. For example, in

one fMRI study published in The Journal of Neuroscience, investigators studied 24 women who

had a history of depression. On average, the hippocampus was 9% to 13% smaller in depressed

women compared with those who were not depressed. The more bouts of depression a woman

had, the smaller the hippocampus” (Harvard Health Publishing). Although people are not born

with depression, and there are easier ways to be diagnosed with it, brain scans that show a

smaller hippocampus can be a good indication that you have one or more types of depression.

Genetics also has an impact on how likely you are to develop depression. According to Stanford

Medicine, major depression is hereditary 40-50% of the time, and higher for severe depression

(Levinson et al).

Like depression, anxiety can also be genetic. If somebody’s parents or grandparents

have/had anxiety, it is more likely that they will also have it at some point in their life. However,

environmental, temperament and biological factors are just as important to figure out if you have

an anxiety disorder or not (“Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) Symptoms & Causes: Boston

Children's Hospital”). Anxiety also affects the brain. Boston Children’s Hospital states, “The

brain has special chemicals, called neurotransmitters that send messages back and forth to

control the way a person feels. Serotonin and dopamine are two important neurotransmitters that,

when disrupted, can cause feelings of anxiety” (“Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)

Symptoms & Causes: Boston Children's Hospital”). While anxiety is not simply being shy, it is

more likely for a child who is excessively shy as a child to develop an anxiety disorder of some

kind by the time they are a teenager (“Anxiety Disorders”). Another common cause of anxiety is

having some sort of physical health condition or drinking caffeinated beverages. The National

Institute of Mental Health says, “Some physical health conditions, such as thyroid problems or
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heart arrhythmias, or caffeine or other substances/medications, can produce or aggravate anxiety

symptoms.”

As we learn more ways to educate, school curriculums are constantly changing. Because

of this, students are constantly needing to relearn how to do things they have been doing a certain

way for as long as they remember. But on top of that, high school students are stressed trying to

deal with keeping good grades so they can get into good colleges. Before high school, the

pressure to succeed is not as great as it is in high school. The truth is, most colleges do not care

about what you did pre-high school (Cairns). I felt an excessive amount of stress once I got into

high school. My parents have always been strict about my grades, but once I got into high school

suddenly even when I was trying my best, I could not seem to get my grades high enough for

their liking. This type of stress causes teenagers to develop mental illnesses such as depression.

Anxiety can also be caused by a school environment. For example, having to work with

people you do not know or present in front of the entire class for a grade can lead to social

anxiety. Being bullied for long portions of time can also cause anxiety. For example, if one

teenager was to make fun of another about what they look like, the kid that was bullied may

develop self-esteem issues and may be insecure about how they look. Because that kid got

bullied, they could walk around school anxious that everybody is judging them for what they

look like. While it is not directly the school's fault that teens are being bullied, they could do

more to enforce a strict no-bullying policy. They could also do more to help teenagers who have

a mental illness or even just need somebody to talk to. Too many times does student anxiety gets

ignored by the administration in high schools.

Unfortunately, school shootings are becoming more and more common. This puts

parents, teachers, and students on edge. In The New York Times, a survey was conducted asking
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teenagers how major they thought mental illness was among their peers. The article states,

“Teenagers who grew up in the post-9/11 era, and amid many school shootings, may have

anxiety tied to an environment filled with dire warnings about safety” (Zraick). The fear that a

school shooting could take place at any high school across America at any given time is

frightening, and many teenagers go to school scared. Not only are there people who shoot up

schools, but there are also people who threaten to it just to induce panic. For example, in 2018

Walter E. Stebbins, the high school I attended was in a panic as an anonymous account posted

online that they were going to shoot up SHS. Although the person who posted the threat never

specified which SHS, students, and parents were terrified. The next day, the school had terrible

attendance. School shootings are terrifying for everybody, and many students become anxious to

go to school.

Today’s teenagers are in the growing age of social media, whether it be snapping friends

on Snapchat, posting pictures on Instagram, making funny videos on TikTok, or following the

latest celebrity news on Twitter, they are always tuned in. However, that is not always a good

thing. “In several recent studies, teenage and young adult users who spend the most time on

Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms were shown to have a substantially (from 13 to 66

percent) higher rate of reported depression than those who spent the least time” (Miller). Teens

who have social media account(s) tend to have low self-esteem issues that stem from seeing

people online that they deem themselves less attractive than. This can be extremely damaging to

their mental health and lead to depression. The fear of not being good enough is very real, and

many teens have that fear.

Social media affects anxiety too. For example, many teenagers see others having fun

without them and they often get FOMO or the fear of missing out. When teens see their friends
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having fun without them, they can start to overthink, which leads to thoughts such as whether or

not their friends like them anymore or if they want to stop being their friend. This can lead to

worsening anxiety due to the fact that they think their friends secretly hate them. Even when this

is not their friend’s intention, sometimes getting anxiety over something like this is unavoidable.

Something inevitable with social media is cyberbullying. Unfortunately, sometimes teenagers

can be mean to one another. And with anonymous comment apps such as Tellonym, Yolo, and

Sarahah it is much easier for teens to send hateful messages to each other without getting caught.

Cyberbullying comments on these kinds of apps can lead to worsened symptoms of both

depression and anxiety.

Peer pressure is something that is always present no matter what age you are. However, it

most commonly happens with high school students. There are two types of peer pressure. The

first is active peer pressure, where somebody actively tries to get another person to do

something. The second is passive peer pressure, also called unspoken peer pressure. This is when

one person mimics the behavior of another person from watching them do a certain thing for

long periods (“Peer Pressure”). Peer pressure can eventually lead to either developing anxiety or

developing worse symptoms. A teen that is peer pressured into something could feel overly

anxious around the people who peer pressure them because they feel like they need to act a

certain way to fit in. Peer pressure can also lead to anxiety if what they were peer pressured into

doing was doing drugs or drinking alcohol. For example, if a teen were to be peer pressured into

vaping, they could form a nicotine addiction. Once they decide they want to quit vaping, they

could have withdrawals, which often makes you feel anxious (Humanitas University).

For some of the same reasons, depression is also a result of peer pressure. For example, a

teen giving in to peer pressure could completely change their personality, maybe so they are a
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person they do not want to be. This could cause them to start overthinking the choices that led up

to that personality change and thus make them depressed. Or, the same teen that went through

nicotine withdrawals could end up with depression, as that is another symptom of the

withdrawals (Humanitas University). Peer pressure has dangerous effects when it comes to

mental health. Not only that, but sometimes teens who would normally never do anything

rebellious get peer pressured into doing illegal activities, which could land them in juvenile

detention, which could also result in depression and/or anxiety.

Another great example of something that can lead to depression and anxiety is how

somebody is treated by their parents as a child. For example, if a child has a parent who

constantly tears them down no matter what they do, that child is bound to develop self-esteem

issues that end up leading to depression and anxiety. A parent can not continuously make fun of

and belittle their child and not have that child grow up feeling upset of some kind. Having a

belittling parent can be mentally draining, which is ultimately not good for mental health. Parents

have a huge role on how their child will grow up. While it is not always the parents fault that

their kid could grow into a depressed/anxious teen, it is

Something that also takes over the lives of teens who are diagnosed with depression and

anxiety is self-harm and suicide attempts. Many teens with depression/anxiety feel as if they do

not have anything to live for, which causes them to attempt to commit suicide. However, some

teens do not want to die, or at least do not attempt suicide. Instead, they self-harm (Mayo Clinic

Staff). Teens with depression/anxiety self-harm for many reasons. For example, somebody who

has depression due to being trauma regarding abuse may self-harm because for once they want to

be the one inflicting the pain on themselves rather than somebody else causing them pain.

Another reasons could be that a teen on antidepressants wants to feel something again, good or
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bad. Many antidepressants make you feel numb because instead of replacing the sadness

somebody feels with happiness, they only take away the sadness. This is nowhere near all of the

reasons somebody would want to harm themselves, it is only some. As seen in Figure One, teen

suicide rates have been going up quite a bit. This is horrible, and something needs to be done

about it, as children are taking their own lives for various reasons on a daily basis.

Figure One

This graph is a representation of what I was mentioning above, that teen suicide rates are

starting to get pretty high. This specific graph focuses on Colorado, but it is a good

representation of how fatal teenage depression and anxiety can be (Daley).

There are many different ways that people incorrectly view teenage depression. One of

the most common questions when a parent finds out that their child has depression is, “He has

everything . . . What does he have to be depressed about?” (Miller). This question could be

answered in multiple ways, one of those being the fact that while depression can be triggered by
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things like home life, it is also biological. Not to mention, there could be things going on in a

teen’s life that they fail to tell their parents about. Some teenagers tend to keep everything that

personal from their parents. A lot of people also disagree about what causes depression in

teenagers. Some people believe that it has mostly to do with relationships. For example, there

was a study done in Morocco. In the introduction it stated, “Teen dating in an Arab and a Muslim

country as Morocco happens very often in secret and without parents’ knowledge. The secretive

nature of such relationships . . . have traumatic effects on the mental and physical health of

daters” (Kinany et al). While this makes sense, I have not seen much evidence other than this

short study that this would cause depression. Another huge misconception about teenage

depression is that teens with depression are just lazy and need to work harder so they will not be

so sad. However, depression is not something you can just end with pure willpower (Miller).

Depression affects both energy level and the level of motivation a person has, which makes it

harder to do things that people without depression have no issues with, such as schoolwork,

chores, and personal hygiene.

Teenage anxiety is also massively misunderstood. The most common misconception is

that social anxiety is the exact same thing as being shy, but that is not the case. In fact, shyness is

a personality trait, while anxiety is a mental disorder. Being shy is a personality trait that

somebody with social anxiety can have, however, that does not mean that is all social anxiety is

(Peisley). Those with social anxiety go out of their way to avoid social situations where they

might feel anxious or uncomfortable, while those who are simply shy do not. A good amount of

people believe that not only is anxiety not a real mental illness, but those who claim they have it

are faking it for attention or pity. An example of this is my father. When I still saw him, he often

put me down and told me that I was lying about my anxiety, along with my depression, so he
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would pity me. Obviously, this is not the case, as it has been proven that both are mental

disorders that have the potential to flip a person’s entire world upside down. I do not agree with

the argument that those who are diagnosed fake it for pity.

Mental health has been proven to be a huge issue around the world, especially for teens.

Depression and anxiety are the most common mental illnesses among teens and some even have

both rather than just one or the other. There are many things that can cause both depression and

anxiety, but even more things that can lead to worsened symptoms and even developing

depression/anxiety. Things such as academic expectations, peer pressure, social media, school

shooting fears, and more can make today’s teens have lack of confidence and also make them

feel pressured into looking, acting, and learning a certain way, which leads to depression and

anxiety. To fix this growing issue in society, there needs to be a change. Schools need to offer

more support to mentally ill children and teens, academic expectations should not be so high,

there needs to be reform to minimize school shootings, and social media platforms need to be

more strict on anti-bullying platforms. Schools also need to do more about helping kids who

were bullied by not turning a blind eye to bullies, but to actually punish them as thy should be

punished.
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Works Cited

“Anxiety Disorders.” National Institute of Mental Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human

Services, July 2018, www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/anxiety-

disorders/index.shtml#part_145335. Accessed 10 July 2020.

Cairns, Hilary. “Do Colleges Look at Middle School Grades? - College Raptor.” College Raptor

Blog, 18 Oct. 2019, www.collegeraptor.com/getting-in/articles/myths/myth-middle-

school-doesnt-count-for-college-admissions/. Accessed 11 July 2020.

Daley, John. “The Number of Deaths By Suicide Per 100,000 Adolescence Ages 15-19.” The

Rate Of Teen Suicide In Colorado Increased By 58% In 3 Years, Making It The Cause Of 1

In 5 Adolescent Deaths, 17 Sept. 2019, www.cpr.org/2019/09/17/the-rate-of-teen-suicide-

in-colorado-increased-by-58-percent-in-3-years-making-it-the-cause-of-1-in-5-adolescent-

deaths/.
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“Data and Statistics on Children's Mental Health.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 15 June 2020,

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“Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) Symptoms & Causes: Boston Children's Hospital.”

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Kinany, S.e.l., et al. “The Association between Teen Dating Violence, Dates’ Substance Abuse,

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