Question:
Teenage and childhood depression seem difficult to diagnose because the symptoms are not only different, but they get mixed up with other changes and difficulties of those years. I don't want her to get stuck in an escalating cycle of drugs and side effects and more drugs, like I am. OTOH, I don't want her to suffer for 20+ years like I did before getting treated. I'd appreciate the benefit of your experience - feel free to email me if you like.
Answer:
I was 13 when I first say someone about my depression. I always wonder if things would have been different if I had been treated earlier. By the time I got into therapy I had fallen much further into the mental
illness. The actual way I was living and certain events brought everything to a crisis. I wonder if I had been functioning to begin with how I would have handled things. Therapy and meds (even hospitalization) did not work, but much of that is due to confusion over what was wrong with me. By treating the illness early on, I think I could be in a whole different place now - and then. My advice would be to listen to her. If she doesn't want to take a certain medication ask why. Weight gain, shakiness, and blood tests can seem like too big a
sacrifice to a teenager. I avoided lithium because I didn't want my handwriting to suffer. Odd I know, but I felt strongly about it. Basically, don't push anything - medications or talk therapy - if you daughter doesn't want it. Be her biggest ally and make sure she knows that you are behind, that she can trust you. Once my parents let go of the control, I could relax and stop fighting them long enough to at least try. My depression is far from treated and has only gotten worse over the years, so I don't have a happy resolution to things. But for years I never reached out to my parents and now I know I can call them and let them "carry me" when I can't move another step. As a mother, I know you must be in a lot of pain. I can't imagine my son feeling this way - I would kill to keep him out of this hell. I do know that if he was, the only thing I would want besides him feeling better would be for him to be able to let me in to help him, to listen, and to fight the illness when he was too weak. My heart goes out to you, and I'm sorry that my advice is simply to keep you child from pushing you away. At http://www.beatdepression.com is a teen's book detailed that deals with the depression from a teen's point of view. Check it out, great resource for anyone but especially for teen sufferers. Let me know what you think.
I'm not a parent, but more of the teenager persuasion, I thought my perspective might be of help.
IF you go with the strict neurochemical basis for depression, this is absolutely true. Serotonin for example, has higher concentrations in small children, drops off during adolescence, and returning to normal levels as adulthood sets in. So if there is a predisposition to depression (if this has been proven to exist I’m not aware of it), or a situation where it could happen, then being a teenager will certainly make it worse unfortunately. I think most teens will have some sort of depressive *episode*, at least once in those years. It those that don’t quite come out of it (myself inclusive), that we need to worry about.
My pdoc (non-talker), as he was writing my scrip the other day told me that people (he didn’t single out any age group) who go two prong, meds and talk therapy, have a better success rate of coming out of the depression and are much less likely to have another in the future. If you can learn how to control it now through external and internal means *now*, then the future will likely be much easier to deal with.
The most basic advice I can give your daughter is just to remain open to life. Talk to friends, try not to drop of the scene, find those things that make life that much more decent and work with those, find those things that are contributing to the external stresses and see how you can manage them.
