Tired Teens, Health-Vulnerable Children

Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario and the Royal Ottawa Hospital recently revealed how stressed they have become for space, time and professional attention to the recent spate of young people requiring care for depression. They're so short of beds and time to look after those already admitted for professional attention, they have had to call a halt to any further self-admissions.

It's already clear that teens are very vulnerable to depression and stress. And that symptoms of a life-long struggle with depression begin to show up in teens vulnerable to depression between the ages of 14 and 15. We're also advised that a dismal one out of five teens eventually get the help they require to enable them to combat their depression and live normal lives.

Young people also are susceptible to the kind of secret despair, kept from those closest to them, who live most intimately with them, that leads to thoughts of suicide. Recent such incidents, occurring with young people who appear to have everything right in their lives - intact families with father and mother and siblings, no financial concerns, good grades at school, a circle of friends, engagement in sports activities - and yet something integral to the balance of their mental health appears awry.

And no one aware of it.

Their deep-seated unhappiness is discovered only after they have taken their own lives. Then speculation abounds, and the family is stricken that they had no idea. And they had no idea; they had no suspicions, had no reason to even remotely consider that their child was battling depression, and had sunk into such a deep trench of misery that committing suicide seemed the only release from the bleak blackness of depression.

It is even possible that society expects too much of its young people. Teens have become notorious for complaining about a lack of energy, of being continually tired. There is so much busing to area schools now, and such a tight lid kept on school board expenses, that bus routes are doubled and tightened up, picking students up at earlier times to deposit them at their schools well before classes begin.

Where buses begin picking students up before 7:00am for the morning run into school, and there is dead time while students wait for classes to begin. Then when students return from school to their homes they are burdened with often excessive amounts of assigned homework, leaving them little time for leisure or sport-related activities, let alone for part-time work that some teens must take on.

Early bed times aren't always feasible, and most teens don't relish the thought of bedtime at 8:00pm, to enable themselves to catch enough sleep before having to rise at 6:00am to get the minimum amount of sleep a teen requires; far more than an adult, at between eight to ten hours a night for a needed rest period. Lack of sufficient rest can lead to a general state of debilitation from continued lack of energy and feelings of extreme sleep deprivation.

That state of exhaustion can lead to depression, and there's the formula for mental illness. While many teens complain they're continually tired, that they're fed up with the amounts of homework they're assigned, with a lack of leisure time for other types of activities, they don't get too much sympathy from the larger society.

But they should.