Don’t Confuse a Depressed Teenager with an Anxious One
Mother: Do you think he’ll put his fist through the wall?
Father: Let’s hope it’s not his head
And so begins another evening of pillow talk between the parents of an angry, sullen teenager.
If your child is angry, negative, brooding and avoids people and you’re thinking depression, think again.
More and more research shows that in a majority of cases where adults or adolescents have a mixture of anxiety and depression, the anxiety comes first and in most cases causes the depression. That anxiety causes such people to withdraw socially, self-medicate with alcohol or pot, and eventually to have it cross over to poor school or work performance. It’s these disastrous effects that intolerable anxiety has on their lives that causes them to feel depressed, it’s not the depression itself.
This is important to keep in mind, because although many of anti-depressant medications (such as Lexapro, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor) are also effective on anxiety, anxiety is a different entity than depression and requires a different approach.
If you treat the depression and miss out on the underlying anxiety that’s causing it, people with it will not do as well.
Unfortunately one of the worst combinations that adolescents can have is what I refer to as the “Triple A - lethal cocktail of adolescence” = Anxiety, Alcohol and Arrogance. The anxiety and alcohol use are quite treatable, but it is that “leave me alone,” refuse to accept help arrogance that keeps adolescents from getting the help they need and getting better.
Please feel free to share this with your adolescent if you think it will help.
Good luck. You’ll need it.
October 25th, 2008 at 12:20 am
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November 13th, 2008 at 9:46 am
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