Studies show  that teens' mental health is rapidly deteriorating. Depression, anxiety, and behavioural disorders are appearing more in teens. This is affecting their social lives, school lives, happiness, family lives, and other important aspects of their life. Teens are feeling more pressure to perform well in school while actively fighting for their mental health. This leads to the issue of teens being too scared to reach out for support. They fear they will be judged or not taken seriously which a lot of the time is the case.

It is very common for teens' mental health to be overlooked as hormones or ‘everyone your age goes through this’.  Social pressure to be perfect also contributes to the issue of teens being too scared to reach out for support. Academic pressure is another factor that contributes to this issue. The pressure to be doing well in school and putting education first makes teens feel like their mental health doesn't matter until their schoolwork is complete and perfect, but in reality, it makes it so much harder to work and focus during school. A sign of teens' mental health worsening is commonly to do with school attendance.

Effects of a youth mental health decline

Mental health issues in youth can lead to more severe cases in adulthood if left untreated and even cause new disorders. Its very common to see teens result to using unsafe coping mechanisms such as substance abuse, self harm, and other dangerous activities that put themselves and others at risk. these coping mechanisms can worsen their mental health and create addiction. When academic pressure  gets put on top of depression, anxiety, ADHD, autism, OCD, PTSD, or other mental health disorders, it creates so much stress that teens feel like there is no escape. This quite often leads to suicide/attempted suicide. 

How can we help prevent this

If we normalise talking about mental health in a judgement free space, we can get the message across  to more people that lots of teens are struggling but don't show it. By spreading awareness, we can make teens feel more comfortable talking about their mental health and feeling like they can reach out when they are in need. this can prevent the youth mental health crisis from getting worse and even drop the number of mentally unhealthy teenagers. this will also lower the amount on teenagers using substances and the teen suicide rate. 

Graph

This graph here shows the severity of depression levels of teens in school. The majority is not depressed. The minority has depression. This is another reason it's so commonly overlooked, because it's a minority. Especially in depression cases where they suffer from moderate-severe depression. The majority of people with depression are dealing with mild depression which can be much easier to treat with counseling and often these mild cases will not need medication or intense therapy. With the more severe cases, they require a lot more work and often these people will be put on medication to try to cure their depression. This is only if they actually get the help they need without being overlooked as dramatic or just a hormonal teen.