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What is depression?

“Depression (major depressive disorder) is a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think and how you act.”

The best, effective, treatment for this is antidepressant medication.

Dysthymic Disorder (Persistent depressive disorder) causes you to have a low mood for as long as a year, sometimes even longer. What this means is that you will feel sad a lot of the time. The symptoms you would experience would be sadness, feeling tired very often, changes in eating habits, and changes in sleeping habits. About 2% of the American population has this type of depression. The best treatment would be therapy as opposed to medication, although combining the two might result in a faster improvement.

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) takes place during the winter weather, this is due to the lessening of the sunlight during those months. The symptoms include lack of energy, eating more than you would usually, sleeping more and gaining weight. People are diagnosed after they have had these symptoms present during the winter for more than 2 years. This type of disorder can be treated with artificial light treatment. During light therapy, you sit or work near a device called a light therapy box. The box gives off bright light that mimics natural outdoor light.

Bipolar Disorder used to be known as “manic depression”, because the person experiences depression, normal mood and mania, which is basically the opposite of depression. Symptoms for Bipolar Disorder include feeling great, having a lot of energy, having racing thoughts, little need for sleep, taking fast, having difficulty focusing on tasks. An effective bipolar depression treatment plan may combine different approaches, including medication, talk therapy or counseling, education, self-care strategies, support from family, friends, advocacy groups, and others with bipolar disorder.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a disorder of an individual that is undergoing repetitive patterns such as sadness, feeling of self-worthlessness, thoughts or expression of suicide and self-destruction. (www.teendepression.org). Depression can be spread through families if there is a history of depression. Detecting depression is not always easy to detect because in teens depression and normal teenage moodiness is hard to differentiate. Teens that suffers from depression can lead to failure in school, alcohol or and other drug use and even suicide. There are 15 to 20% of American teens that are involved in depression.

Teen moms heard this a lot from others, the older generation and other teens, "You made your bed, now lie in it." Which means that you decided to have sexual intercourse with a guy and you now have to live with it. But what about their feeling in all of this because many teen fathers or the ones that father the children, since they could not be the mothers’ age and are older than them, don’t want to do anything for the child or children at all so it is hard for the moms, then the sadness set in.

Mood disorders put teens at risk for unplanned pregnancy, increase the chances of postpartum depression, and make parenthood harder. Teen moms face plenty of challenges, from dealing with the shame and stigma of an unplanned pregnancy to finishing school and finding employment. Many must also deal with the challenges of mental illness. Researchers have found that twice as many teen moms are at risk of developing postpartum depression (PPD) as their older counterpart, and nearly three times as many teens with mental illness get pregnant as adolescents without a disorder.

According to a survey of 6,400 Canadian women published in the journal Pediatrics in May 2012, the highest incidence of postpartum depression occurred among girls age 15 to 19 – at a rate twice as high as PPD in moms older than 25.

Although research on the incidence and causes of PPD in teens is scant, a study published in the August 2014 issue of Maternal and Child Health Journal found a correlation in teen moms between increased stress from parenting and the risk of postpartum depression.

That connection makes sense to Gloria Malone, who gave birth to her daughter four days shy of her 16th birthday. "I was so busy taking care of my baby, packing her diaper bag and my backpack in the morning so she could go to daycare and I could go to school," says Malone, now 24 and a teen mom advocate in New York City. "There was no time for myself, and no one stopped to ask me, ‘how are you feeling?' Mental health was not on my radar."

Atypical depression is one category of depression. What’s happening in a person’s life strongly affects atypical depression and its symptoms. These might be major life events, such as graduating, moving, or a breakup or they could be small positive or negative events. Atypical depression is actually very common among teens: Some three million adolescents have at least one major depressive episode annually.

What is Atypical Depression?

Atypical depression is one of several types of depression. It is a subtype of major depressive disorder. It is different from other types of depression, such as melancholic depression, because it is impacted by circumstances in the person’s environment.

Symptoms of atypical depression include increased appetite or weight gain, sleepiness or excessive sleep, fatigue, extreme sensitivity to rejection, problems concentrating, and recurring thoughts of suicide. Those with atypical depression typically no longer enjoy activities that they once found pleasurable and feel a sense of leaden paralysis. Adolescence is typically the time when people with atypical depression first experience symptoms.

There are many different types of depression that can affect teens in ways we just do not know of. People think that their teen is just moody when it can be something entirely different. Depression is something that needs to be caught in the beginning so it can be treated so the teen can live a better life.

Work Citied

Admin, A. (n.d.). Retrieved November 1, 2018, from http://www.teendepression.org/

Alaska Northern Lights, Inc. (n.d.). About Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). Retrieved November 1, 2018, from http://www.alaskanorthernlights.com/sad.php?gclid=CjwKCAjwsfreBRB9EiwAikSUHbOoyX06UEHjPB9RglQnJ7TOVjSoCXiIfVn3tr-OVkpkHnLeu9q3eBoCvQsQAvD_BwE

Monroe, J. (2017, August 31). Atypical Depression | A-Z Teen Health Glossary. Retrieved November 1, 2018, from https://www.newportacademy.com/resources/glossary/atypical-depression/

Persistent depressive disorder (dysthymia). (2017, August 08). Retrieved November 1, 2018, from https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/persistent-depressive-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20350929

The Mental Health of Teen Moms Matters. (n.d.). Retrieved November 1, 2018, from https://www.seleni.org/advice-support/2018/3/14/the-mental-health-of-teen-moms-matters