This paper provides a psychological overview of some of the stresses that an adolescent can face in their development. Stress and depression in adolescents is debatable in regard to whether it is a natural phenomenon that occurs with development, or if it something that should be clinically treated. Some researchers have argued that at least some of a teenagers stress and depression may be normal in the context of their development and the developmental challenges they face.
Teen Stress
TEEENAGAE STRESS & DEPRESSSION
An Overview of Teenage Stress and Depression: Causes and Effects
The number and rate of teenagers or adolescents that deal with clinical levels of stress and/or depression are exceedingly high. Studies have shown that self-efficacy and perceived stress can be related to depression and can come from a range of sources in the modern age. This analysis will provide an overview of stress and depression during adolescent development and consider some of the causes and consequences that these demographics will have to bear by living with this issue. This issue is important because it largely goes unnoticed in the demographic and is often believed to just be a stage in development. However, research indicates that the issue could be far more severe and cause more damage to the individuals than previously believed.
Literature Review
Depression during adolescence has been shown to be highly prevalent and associated with life stressors. Studies found that depressed children were more likely to have had significant stresses in the previous year prior to depression compared to non-depressed children It has been estimated that between 25% and 30% of U.S. students suffer from adverse effects of examination stress. Furthermore, it is assumed that 10 million school students underachieve because of anxiety-related performance impairments (Ghofranipour, Saffari, Mahmoudi, & Montazeri, 2013). This represents an enormous population of children that are being weighed down by the effects of anxiety and depression. Thus the extent of the issue has tangible ramifications for all of society.
Some argue that the problems related to stress and depression among the teenage group are developmental. One author argues that it is at least partially due to a natural process and argues that storm and stress is a vestigial developmental framework, and proposes a more comprehensive approach to understanding adolescent- typical changes based on six premises: (1) The biological changes of adolescence are inevitable and ubiquitous; (2) adolescent biological changes drive various mechanisms of adolescent behavior; (3) adolescent biological changes are shaped by environmental influences; (4) individual differences in adolescent emotional-behavior changes are domain specific and vary in intensity; (5) there are individual differences in the age of onset and duration of periods of adolescent change; and (6) individual differences in the duration and intensity of transitions in emotional arousal are functionally modulated by burgeoning emotion regulation skills (Hollenstein & Lougheed, 2013). Therefore, the biological changes that an adolescent must endure adds to their stress load and can lead to depression.
However, beyond the natural biological changes, there are also factors that can lead to abnormal levels of stress and depression. For instance, one factor, rumination, can be defined as an individual who focuses on the sources of stress or anxiety and internalizes it. Rumination has been found to be a risk factor for depressive and anxiety symptoms in adolescents and one study found that adolescents who engaged in high levels of rumination at baseline were more likely to experience overt, relational, and reputational victimization at a subsequent time point 7 months later, controlling for baseline internalizing symptoms and victimization; These findings suggest that interpersonal stress generation is a mechanism linking rumination to internalizing problems in adolescents and highlight the importance of targeting interpersonal factors in treatment and preventive interventions for adolescents who engage in rumination (McLaughlin & Nolen-Hoeksmea, 2012).
If depression occurs in abnormal levels during development it can lead to maladjustment of the development of an adolescent. High rates of diagnosable depression in adolescence, especially among young women, present challenging clinical and research issues; depression not only portends current maladjustment but may also signal risk for recurrent or chronic depression and its associated impairment (Hammen, 2009). These impairments can affect all areas of life from school work to interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, stress and depression can lead to a vicious cycle even when treated clinically. Individuals with depression histories are known to contribute to the occurrence of interpersonal and other stressors at a high rate, and for young women particularly, the occurrence of interpersonal stressors and conditions in turn predicts recurrences of depression, in a vicious cycle; interpersonal dysfunction in early adolescence predicts the likelihood of continuing maladaptive functioning in peer, family, romantic, and parenting roles (Hammen, 2009).
One way to try to combat the issue of stress and depression in adolescents is to take a proactive approach. There are different cognitive behavior treatments that can help offset the pressures that this demographic faces. For example, mindfulness-based cognitive intervention with adults has been found to be highly effective and as such it has been the subject of much research in the past few decades (Lau & Hue, 2011). One study that conducted a six-week mindfulness-based program in an Asian context and found that well-being, stress and depressive symptoms of both intervention and control groups were assessed at baseline and post-intervention; the findings showed that there was a significant decrease in symptoms of depression and a significant increase in one dimension of well-being among both groups (Lau & Hue, 2011).
There has also been work to determine if there is a correlation between stress and depression in adolescents. It is hard to identify a strong correlation without other mitigating factors being involved. One study aimed to determine the relationships between depressive and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in a sample of adolescent survivors following the Wenchuan earthquake in China and found that that the PTSD symptoms and depression could be considered as two distinct and high-correlated constructs and depression symptomatology pre-event could predict post-event PTS; depression symptoms play a crucial role in the development of PTSD symptoms (Ying & Wu, 2012). Therefore, there is evidence that they are related at least in specific scenarios. Although it is suspected that they are also at least moderately correlated in general.
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