Items Tagged With teenagers

I share these two entries about mental health issues in school settings - this one about high school and the next about college - as an opportunity to open up the dialogue for teens and young adults that will soon be either returning to high school or beginning college.

I went through high school and college with undiagnosed depression, anxiety and PTSD. I was an overly stressed-out person, and it is only in hindsight that I see my missed opportunities and close calls. My good decisions occurred only through sheer happenstance or by default. Perhaps by sharing an "inside look" at my experience, I may support those teens and young adults who are still in school and coping with mental health issues, and help them to make good decisions with forethought.

A youth welfare group has come up with a novel way to improve mental health in young people: an online video game.

But players won't be gunning down hordes of alien scum a la Halo, or hooning around the track in a BMW M3, Need for Speed style.

Rather, Reach Out Central, championed by the Inspire Foundation, is an online role-playing game in which players can "test-drive life and play it when and how you want to".

Helping and befriending the computer-controlled characters that inhabit the online world is essential, and Inspire hopes skills developed in the game - and choices made there about friends, partying, work and life in general - will transfer to the real world.

Inspire Foundation's director of programs, Jonathan Nicholas, said the program, launched today, targeted young people aged 16-25. Young males had been particularly difficult to engage using other communication vehicles, such as information sites.

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A talking cure for depression called cognitive behavior therapy appears to cancel the risk of suicidal thinking or behavior associated with taking antidepressant medication, according to the most comprehensive and long-running study to date of depression treatment among adolescents.

The study, which followed for a year more than 600 adolescents being treated for chronic depression, found that four in five recovered entirely, or nearly so, when treated over nine months with medication, talk therapy or a combination of the two.

Patients taking medication showed significant signs of improvement up to six weeks earlier than those who received talk therapy alone, but were about twice as likely to report feeling suddenly suicidal. The combination of the two therapies, the authors found, produced the most rapid recovery and protected against sudden suicidal urges.

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