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;...

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…