The Side Effects Of Depression

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What is depression? Depression is a mental illness that can affect the way someone lives their life. It is more intense than someone simply feeling a little sad, it is more serious than that and it requires treatments to help someone cope with it (“Depression.”). Depression increases the risk of suicide in children and it can also make kids feel things that they shouldn’t feel since they are so young. It can make children feel hopeless and that there is no reason to get up and perform daily activities.
One type of depression that affects children is major depressive disorder or MDD, which affects about five percent of children (United States. National Institute of Mental Health). In the article Treating Depressed Children With Antidepressants: …show more content…

One of these possible effects could include a change in mood (Antonuccio 93). This could be considered a risk because children may become angry and may act without thinking. Another side effect that is a possible risk is sleeping troubles. When taking antidepressants some children may experience a change in sleep pattern. Some children may want to sleep all the time, while other children may not want to sleep at all. This affects children 's daily activities, if children sleep a lot, kids won’t be focused during school or any other daily activities and if children sleep too little it will have the same effect because they are tired. Children 's grades may drop and so might the desire to learn. This is something that I have seen happen in a child, my younger sister had depression and she wanted to sleep all the time. This caused her daily life to only be filled with sleeping. She never wanted to go to school because she wanted to sleep, Her grades started to drop because she didn’t care and all she wanted to do was sleep. She didn 't want to talk to her friends because she wanted to sleep. It was all she did for a period of time. It seems like she always had a feeling of hopelessness, so she just slept. She may have wanted to sleep to escape from what she was feeling, which is something that no child should have to go through. She was later diagnosed with MDD and was prescribed Prozac, which helped her lose some of the effects of depression. Children won’t want to feel sad and hopeless all the time, so children may find different ways to escape those feeling. Unfortunately, one of those ways that children may try to escape is through suicide. So, are the risks that may occur in children taking antidepressants a reason to stop prescribing

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