Stress and Suicide

Suicide has been a big problem for a long time. People with different ages has been taking their own life by thinking it is a solution to all of their problems. This paper will focus on how teenagers struggle with depression and stress and how that can result suicide. A lot of researches shows that the rate of adolescent boys and girls suicide has been steadily rising. There are alot causes and reasons to this result.

The age of adolescent is the hardest transition of all ages. Adolescent can be divided into three. Early adolescent ages eleven to fourteen, middle adolescents ages fifteen to seventeen, and late adolescent age eighteen to twenty-one. In this ages there are a lot of physical and mental developments. It is a transition period from late childhood to adulthood. In between this transition there will be a lot of changes in education, unemployment to employment, and living circumstances. The transition of adolescent is the most challenging because it is the age where everything start changing, where we start making our own decision and our psychological and physical start to change. There can be a lot of load on one person once they get to this turning point. A lot of stress can be caused at this age, things we never cared about start being a problem. For example relationship issues, friendships, parents, school grades. Adolescent means to grow up. This is the age where we ask different questions and and try to know and be everything, where we start wanting to take everything under our control and this is the age to understand all we do it for us. This is the age where the real responsibilities come and when parents start giving more attention.

Stress and depression are a serious problem for many adolescents. Stress is defined as 1) pressure or tension exerted on a material object. 2) a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances. And depression is defined as 1) feelings of severe despondency and dejection. 2) a long and severe recession in an economy or market. As it is defined stress and depression can be caused by many different ways. There are lots of reason that can lead adolescents to be stressful or depressed. It is alarming that the teen stress experience is so similar to that of adults. It is even more concerning that they seem to underestimate the potential impact that stress has on their physical and mental health, says APA CEO and Executive Vice President Norman B. Anderson, PhD. In order to break this cycle of stress and unhealthy behaviors as a nation, we need to provide teens with better support and health education at school and home, at the community level and in their interactions with healthcare professionals. (APA CEO and executive vice president Norman B. Anderson, PhD).

Thousands of teens commit suicide each year. Suicide is the third leading cause of death following unintentional injury and homicide. And for most of suicide that are commited studies shows that there is always some metal health problem. Depression or stress are one of the common mental health problems. Mostly teens don't plan to commit suicide it just happen after an argument or getting in trouble. Teen suicides can mostly happen because of family problems, not fitting in school, or relationship problems. Many suicides are impulsive, with just minutes or an hour elapsing between the time a person decides upon suicide and when he or she committed the act. ( Dadoly, Annmarie)

There can be different reasons adolescents be in this type of situation. between my job, homework, responsibilities at home, and studying for my SATs, it is easy to feel stressed out and overwhelmed. -female, Los Angeles. I explained some of the examples as followed: Parents are not always the best people when it comes to sharing how stressful you are at school. School can be very hard and some people might be shy, afraid or just not interested to ask and for this reasons their grade might be poor. when parents see this they do not expect from their son or daughter to have poor grades and they get angry and they can express their feeling in different ways without asking why this might have happened to their child. This reactions from parents make the teens more stressful than they are and it might have them think negative things about them self.. Adults tend to run in to conclusion instead of asking question or stopping and thinking. Peer pressure can be another main reason why adolescents fall into depression or stress which leads to suicide. It might be hard for some people to fit in the big crowd or to find the right circle. After I started this research I have tried to talk to some people who fall under this age to get what their opinion is. I have included some of question and answer I had with this people.

"What do you think is the main reasons for teen suicides?", I asked the question. Teenagers are trying to figure out who they are…… and trying to find what suit them best in sports, friends and they feel trapped being around all this which causes stress and depression. It is not easy to find who we are. We always get in to something that seems cool and we always try to fit in even when we know and understand it is not for us. was one of the shorts and obvious answer I got from age of 15 a 10th grade student. In my opinion it's obvious that people lose their true self once they get to this age they try to be the someone else. We try to be likable by everyone. We confuse our need with our want and we try to impress the people we do not like. But sometimes things do not go the way they were inted. Sometimes it will be hard for us to fit in and that causes a lot of stress because we could experience bullying, academic pressure, dating issues, all at the sametime. Different people take this problem in different ways some people might commit suicide without trying to get help and some people might just accept what they have. bullying might be the main reason people get stressed. Bullying might happen because of your appearance or people just want to bother you. Appearance is not something you can change for example look at me I'm short and most of my friends and classmates are tall even the people who are younger than me are taller than so when we start talking about height my friend love picking on me, I get mad but I don't let it get to my head I know it's impossible to change that so I can't do nothing about it but live with the fact that I am short. this was answered by my own little brother kaleab tekelu who is 13 years old in 8th grade. I agree with his statement because I went through the same problem as him. People are just different there are people who choose to face problems, there are people who can not handle their problems. As I explained at the beginning adolescents stress about everything even about things they can change. For example their appearance. Appearance is always a problem for most of the girls not just for teens but even for adult womens. Girls get stressed over what they look like. They try their hardest to look good they cover their true beauty with different makeovers and they still don't get satisfied. They have a very low self esteem and confidence. And others might not even have the chance to get this materials so they make their self believe they are worth nothing which is not true but my point is this lead them to huge stress and their stress might make them act different and even hurt their self. Having struggles with eating disorders for many years, I finally realize that I make comparisons and let the appearance/discussion of my peers sometimes alter my own body image, -female, Los Angeles. This age is a very complicated age it might make you happy or miserable.

Most people I asked gave me very similar responses. After I started doing this research I have been paying attention to people's behaviors and their reaction to different situations. The most common behaviors of a person with stress and depression are to be Irritated and restlessness,angry outbursts, spending increasing amounts of time sleeping, withdrawing from once-pleasurable activities, Increasing challenges in meeting demands of school work, home, social, and scholastic life, Self-harm, Suicide attempts. It is hard to find all this symptoms in one person but I have seen a couple of people that are irritated and do not socialize with people. They always have something to complain about and they are never satisfied with the thing they have. I have tried to be closer to one of my friends at school to understand what the causes could be for her to act this way. Mostly she talked about how she have no one to listen to her and encourage for the things she does. And she also mentioned how there is always a fight with her brother. As i understood her brother have some kind of metal problem too which is why he gets in a fight with his own sister and mother. This girl have no one to help her with her school staff and she have no one to ask for advice or to talk to at home. What is keeping me going is my friend she mentioned. For her the friends she have at school are more than friends. They are her family she explained to me how they always work together at school staff and even if she do not have lunch how they share theirs with her. This is what is keeping her going. what is keeping her alive. But the sad part is when the day is over she still have to go back to her house. Not all people with stress problems talk to their problems like this. Mostly their are quite and they keep their problems to their self . Which hurt them a lot.

There are days I can't explain myself to someone else. There are days when I do not know the words that come out of my mouth. Our anger and happiness sometimes we can not control. We stress over little things which end up building up in our head and make us stress more and more. Most teens are not used to letting out what they are thinking about or what they are stressing over. Of Course they complain about things but it will be hard to find a teen talking to an adult about what they are feeling about certain situations. Teens need support. We need to have someone we can trust in our life. We have to find someone we can talk to about anything and everything without thinking how they might judge us. Talking can help in so many different ways. It is a way of exercising your mind. Let's say you are going through some kind of fight with a friend and you been thinking about what happened between you two for long time now. But you still haven't found an answer or the answer you found is not helping the situation. But instead of stressing your head if you talk to someone outside of the situation you might even find a solution to your problem. Because that person might give you their personal perspective based on what you have told them. Someone outside of the situation will be able to be more objective about what is going on and might have a solution you did not thought of. Even if they don't give you any thought just talking about it will help you put the puzzles in your head together. My personal experience with talking is my youngest brother sometimes say he sees scary dreams and he will still be afraid on the day time so i sit him down and make him talk about what he saw in his dreams. And he will tell me about this big people chasing him and they long nails. The first thing I do after he finish talking is laugh at him so he can understand that it is no big deal. He can not help himself so he will laugh with me and we will make jokes about how he could be scared of this type of staff and the next thing I know is he is better than ever. Just making him talk and giving my perspective of what his dream is about made him change is mind. The conclusion of this explanation is that talking to someone we trust can make us see the things that have been messing with our head on another different level. It help us to see things in different perspectives and put the puzzles together. When we are stressed for different reasons we mostly to think of solution that help for short amount of time.

Most teenagers get into drugs and alcohol in early age. In the perspective of helping them forget their problems. A lot people get into alcohol and drug addictions thinking it will help them see the happy part of life. It is surprising to see how many people believe in this theory and have myth. There a lot people who believe that drugs can help relieve stress but the truth is that drug can damage your brain the same way stress does. Also if a person is addicted to a drug it make it even harder to this person to deal with stress. Their brain will become more sensitive to stress than normal people. Not only the drug damage their brain it affects body size, and their general health. People deal with stress in different ways. NIDA researchers have found that teenagers who become addicted to drugs may already be hypersensitive to stress. Also that stress can put people at risk for substance abuse.

In conclusion stress and depression can be cause for several reason. It might be because of appearance, school work, job, relationship, family problem, etc. people handle this situation in different ways. Some people look for solutions some people give up. Which leads them to take their own life. Suicides on teens have been increasing because of this problems. Special now social medias make it hard for teenagers to be who they are. People always try to be who they are not and try to impress others. We confuse our wants with our need and we put our self in danger. We need to understand that life isn't always going to be how we want it and there's always going to be a problem, we have to make sure we are responding to our problems in the right way.

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