Should Teens Be Screened For Depression

Or them finding it difficult to be able to have lively conversations with a loved one with this illness.
Many people believe that depression does not exist and scientists are wasting time and money on research but in fact, it has been proven that there are many people suffering from this mental illness. After conducting a research it has been revealed that “an estimated 11.4% of U.S. adolescents, or about 2.8 million people, had at least one “major depressive episode” in a 12-month period” (1 Should All Teens Be Screened for Depression?). 2.8 million may be a small number compared to the total population of the U.S.A which is approximately 300 million people, but these are still young adolescents that suffer from depression and deserve to be

People also are not aware of what schizophrenia really is and what it does to one’s brain. The most common age for someone to develop schizophrenia is between ages 16 and 30 years old, in rare cases, children can be schizophrenic as well. This illness impacts every aspect of one's life, it is “a chronic and severe mental disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves” (1 Schizophrenia). When it comes to symptoms, there are positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms. Positive symptoms are psychotic behaviors that are not seen in normal people, these symptoms cause one to lose touch with reality. Some symptoms include hallucinations, delusions, movement disorders and thought disorders. When it comes to negative symptoms of schizophrenia, they affect normal emotions. Negative effects take most emotions out of one’s life like the flat affect which is a reduced expression of emotions on the face and in the voice. Other symptoms may include reduced pleasure in everyday life, reduced speaking altogether, and the difficulty of starting and completing tasks. The last set of symptoms affect schizophrenic patients differently, some are subtle, but for others are more severe. These include poor executive functioning which means the struggle to understand and use the information to make decisions, having trouble trying to focus or pay attention and problems with working memory

Scientists are it able to identify whether it is hereditary or not. But scientists do believe that different genes may increase the likelihood of contracting schizophrenia in the future, but it is known that no single gene can cause schizophrenia directly. Nor is it possible for scientists to use genetic information to predict who will have schizophrenia. This illness does not just come out of nowhere, Scientists believe that “interactions between genes and aspects of the individual’s environment are necessary for schizophrenia to develop” (2 Schizophrenia). Some of the environmental factors include exposure to some viruses, malnutrition before birth, problems during birth, and some psychosocial