Depressive Disorder and Your child

What Is the Depressive Disorder?

Depression seems to bear no bounds, it can affect anyone at any point in one`s life. Even children and adolescents can be affected by this serious affliction.
The irritable, lowered mood and lowered self-esteem, loss of interest for engaging into normal activity,  are the symptoms defining this disease and it`s victims. If this mental illness is left untreated it can result in a whole suite of undesirable conducts like drug use and abuse, absentheism and failure in school and, ultimatelly, even suicide.

Look for the signs in your child:

•  Drug and alcohol abuse

•  Low energy and chronic fatigue

•  Lack of enthusiasm or motivation

•  Enhanced sensitivity or agitation

•  Continual thoughts of death or suicide

•  Neglected school or lowered school functioning

•  Overwhelming feelings of sadness and hopelessness

•  Lack of focus, indecisiveness, or lowered apprehension

•  Excessive guilt, feelings of worthlessness, helplessness

• Social withdrawal and loss of interest towards pleasureable activities

• Predominantly physiologic complaints such as headaches and stomachaches

• Altered eating and sleeping patterns (weight loss or gain, insomnia or hypersomnia)

Potential causes which might trigger depression include:

1. Children that have gone through any kind of trauma or loss are more likely to develop some form depression
2. Children with learning, attention or behavioral disorders are at a higher risk for depression
3. Adolescent girls are more likely to develop some form of depression
4. If there's a family history of depressive disorder, children are more likely to develop depression
5. A high procentage of runaway children suffer from depression

If experienced early and left untreated, depression is more likely to spring up later on in life. Typically a more aggresive form of the disease will develop and bear upon the individual in adulthood.
In some extreme cases, early depression may predict future suicidal-related conducts.

Solutions for the depressive child's parents:
Whenever a child's behaviour seems suspect, pointing towards an early onset of depression, adults should:

• Inform themselves regarding the signs of depressive disorder
• Monitor the child and take into account the length, frequency and severity of the problems when they occur
• Ask for psychiatrical advice and diagnosis
• Stay informed about health services, possible prevention and treatment for depression
• Join an organization or family network which focuses on prevention, treatment or general counseling

Depression is treatable. Early diagnosis and treatment are essential for children with depression. Children who exhibit symptoms of depression should be referred to and evaluated by a mental health professional who specializes in treating children and adolescents. The diagnostic evaluation may include psychological testing, laboratory tests and consultation with other specialists. A comprehensive treatment plan may include psychotherapy, ongoing evaluation and monitoring, and in some cases, psychiatric medication. Optimally, this plan is developed with the family, and whenever possible, the child or adolescent is involved in treatment decisions.

Depression is a treatable condition. If children exhibit symptoms of depression, acting early and seeking proper diagnosis and treatment are essential for the young individual. A comprehensive treatment program may include attentive supervision, psychotherapy, ongoing evaluation and in some rare cases, medication.

What is the depressive disorder ?

Depressive disorder is a state of low mood and aversion to activity.  A depressed person is having feelings of sadness, helplessness and hopelessness. Feeling "depressed" is often similar to feeling "sad", but both clinical depressive disorder and non-clinical depressive disorder can also refer to a conglomeration of more than one feeling.

What are the symptoms of the depressive disorder ?

• Psychological or physiological wear out and loss of vitality

• Feelings of guilt, hopelessness, anxiety, dread, or weakness

• Reduced amount of involvement or joy in all, or almost all, daily activities mostly every day

• Altering appetite and detectable weight loss or gain

• Psychomotor agitation or deceleration almost daily

• Feelings of overwhelming sadness or fear or the apparent inability to experience emotion

• Trouble focusing or making decisions or a generalized retardation and obtunding of cognition including memory

• Unbalanced sleeping patterns such as excessive sleep or hypersomia, insomnia, or deprivation of paradoxical sleep

• Continual thoughts of death, not just fear of dying, haunting suicide ideation with precise plan, or a particular plan of committing suicide or suicide attempt.

  Additional clinical depression symptoms occasionally accounted for but not typically taken into account in diagnosis include:

• Lack of attention to personal hygiene

• Concern of “becoming mad”

• Diminishing self-esteem

• Alteration in perception of time

• Sensitivity to noise

• Physiological pains and achings with the impression that they may constitute signs of grave sickness

The depressive has pervasive and uninterrupted depressive thoughts and conducts. They manifest themselves in every area of life and never pass away . The patient is gloomy, dejected, pessimistic, overly serious, lacks a sense of humor, cheerless, joyless, and constantly unhappy. This dark mood is not influenced by changing circumstances.

His self-image is distorted: he appreciates himself to be un-needed, incapable, a failure. His sense of self-worth and his dignity are invariably and unrealistically low. This borders on self-disgust and self-denial. The Depressive corrects himself unnecessarily. His interior dialog (occasionally spoken) is derogatory towards himself, blaming and self-critical. Freud called this inner judge the Superego. The Depressive's Superego is sadistic, grim, relentless, self-denigrating, and, ultimate hatefully suicidal. Dimly aware of this semi-suicidal streak, Depressives are by nature anxious and inclined towards excessive worrying and pondering.

The Depressive extends this leaning to humiliate and punish to his closest and beloved. His masochism is complemented by equally exigent sadism. He's negativistic, passive-aggressive, discriminative, faultfinding, and correctional towards other people. Such repeated outbursts are accompanied by feelings of remorse and guilt, frequently coupled with maudlin and flat apologies.

It seems that the Depressive fails to shift perspectives, focusing almost always on the "what is", never even giving a chance to "what could be". He is lost in the past, wandering thru a forest of self-failures with the Superego as his only companion. Trying to cope with his failures, the depressive often chooses to view the dark side of those around him, judging and blalming like there`s no tomorrow, continuing to fail to see the beauty in the world, thus feeding his inner saddness further. If the depressive were only to remember a simple truth: 

THE WORLD AROUND YOU ACTS 
AS A MIRROR OF THE INNER YOU

(can even be explained by quantum physics nowadays).

So if the "what you see around you" makes you feel this way, why not change perspective? Choose to see something else. Looping in a bad enviroment won`t result in changing it to a better enviroment, on the contrary, you will continue to spiral down making things even worse for yourself. So stop right there! Let`s make a short perspective shift right now!

1. Stop whatever you are doing (it might be a cause for your low mood) and focus all your energy and thoughts on the most enjoyable moment/event/activity of your life! And i do mean FOCUS. Let nothing/nobody break this focus. Try to make this into a habit: whenever you`re down, engage into the activity that makes YOU the POSITIVE YOU (be it remembering something funny, playing a computer game, enjoying an icecream or whatnot). Do it regularly until you make a habit out of just feeling good.

2. Fight it! If there trully is a problem, there trully is a solution to it! I know it can be hard to do while being depressive and nothing ever feels worthwhile doing, but you are the only one who can pull yourself out of the negative loop you entered. Find your problem, see it`s source (it`s root) and let it go. Be at peace with it and let it go.

3. Now get dressed and go for a walk! That`s right, turn off the computer and go for a walk. A few things to remember tho': try to look around you while you walk (always looking down at the asphalt won`t do much good to your internal state). This walk is intended to make you face the world, and you don`t want to face it with your head down, show a little dignity, god damn it! Also try using a different route you haven`t used before (so you won`t eventually fall prey to your boredom enemy), maybe you`ll see new things, maybe a new perspective is just waiting for you around the corner.

4. Be good. Be the change you want to see in the world and that change will be reflected back to you. It trully is a no-brainer that you have been constantly feeding your depression by acting depressed and seeing only via the eyes of the depressive. That is why this step is so important. You will need to pay constant attention to your inner state and slowly change your depressive ways towards the non-depressive ways.