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 Parenting 101 - Parenting Advice Understanding Teenage Depression: A Guide to Diagnosis, Treatment and Management By Maureen Empfield, M.D., and Nicholas Bakalar Chapter One: More Common Today Than Ever Some estimates are that as many as 8 percent of adolescents suffer from depression at some time during any one-year period, making it much more common than, for example, eating disorders, which seem to get more attention as a source of adolescent misery. This book will tell you what you need to know about depression -- whether you are the teenager suffering from it, or the parent who loves a depressed teenager. Even among psychiatrists and other mental health care professionals, the extent of the disability caused by depression is vastly underestimated. The World Health Organization has found that major depression is the single greatest cause of disability in the world -- more than twice as many people are disabled by depression as by the second leading cause of disability, iron-deficiency anemia. Other diseases and disorders may get more press or more research money, or more sympathy and concern from a well-meaning public, but major depression causes more long-term human misery than any other single disease. When I was a resident in psychiatry, we believed that true depression was rare among teenagers, or that insofar as it existed, it was just a normal phase of adolescent development with no lasting consequences. It didn't take long after I began treating troubled kids to see that this couldn't possibly be true. Research over recent decades has confirmed my impression. These beliefs, if anyone still holds them, are false and dangerous. In fact, early onset depression is not normal, and can predict numerous unhappy life events for youngsters, including school failure, teenage pregnancy, and suicide, attempts. Although depression is today increasingly common, it is among the oldest diseases recorded in the history of medicine. As early as the fourth century, the symptoms of "melancholia" were well known and attributed to an excess of "black bile." In other words, depression was first thought of as an exclusively physical illness -- the loss of appetite, sleeplessness, irritability, and general despondency of depression were believed to have a physical, not a psychological, cause. It wasn't until the nineteenth century -- when the term depression was invented to substitute for melancholia -- that a psychological understanding of the illness began to develop. Eventually this psychological explanation of depression would become the only one, although today it no longer is. We now know that depression has both psychological and physical symptoms, and that both psychological and medical treatments can help to alleviate them.
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