Mental Health In Teens

Teenagers’ mental health is a very sensitive and tough subject to discuss. Kids from 12-19 often do not know how to properly relieve stress in a healthy way, which does more harm than anyone realizes. Because of things like school, grades, sports, social situations, and even home lives, our teenagers are often placed under huge amounts of mental and emotional stress that weigh on them over time.

For example, one of the biggest stressors for kids nowadays is school. Everyone worries about if they are going to upset their parents, if they get high enough grades to stay on a school sports team, or even if they will make their parents proud of them. This places a lot of the blame and trauma only on these kids even though everything and everyone around them have a part in it too. Even the best, happiest, and most successful teenagers understand the anxiety and strain that these things can put on them. Some of these kids do not know how to handle all this stress so they even act out.

They can possibility act out by misbehaving at school, starting drug use, or starting alcohol use. All of these negative behaviors can even lead to worse things as well. They do not start these bad habits because they want to rebel against the good. Rather, they start them because they do not know what else to do to handle all of these hormones and emotions that often hit them all at one time. As these young teens and young adults grow older, they turn to worse self-abuse due to the things they tried or used as kids, which do not have the same effect on them and their emotional state anymore.

We all see these horror stories of bad things happening at parties, hang outs, and other social gatherings that have been way too normalized over time. It should not be so normal for kids to feel like they do not have an outlet to get all of these emotions and thoughts out before they try, act upon, or do something negatively.

Not even the parents of these new teenagers understand the burden of their own minds that can be so harmful to them that they act out or act upon a bad thought or idea. Teenagers do not know how to talk to their parents, school administrators, or adult that they trust out of fear of judgement that can possibly take place. Often times, these adult figures are even way too close to the situation to help these children that are in desperate need for the attention they deserve to fix themselves. Therefore, these young adults and teens do not end up getting the help that they require to get better mentally and physically, which causes them to spiral out of control.

Everyone worries if his or her grades are good enough for self or parents. More often than not, if you do not preform well in schoo,l then you are seen as “dumb” or “not smart” when in reality, you are just not doing well with the material that you are learning. Some students do not take the subjects in and do not pick up on it as fast or as well as the other students might. These kids are often very smart with hands–on learning or extra curricular activities they can do that is not just math or memorizing formulas. There is usually more to these kids then they give themselves credit for because they judge themselves on their ability to do well in school alone.

Most of the kids that I personally know or talk to have experienced some sort of stress due to school, school-related activities, sports, or even home life. The adults always say its just hormones or our brains developing, but these things are way too common among us for it to only be our brains. We need to take an extra step in the right direction to fix these things. We need to find a way to help and relieve these stressful situations on these kids before something that we can not take back occurs. This is a big problem that we need to find a solution for before we get older and do not know how to break bad habits which causes massive amounts of downfall for our country and youth of America.