Craig wrote:
When you are an adolescent you experience emotions that you haven't experience previously. Adult emotions that, because they are new, are difficult to interpret correctly. They can therefore appear far more extreme than if a fully mature adult were experiencing them. Perhaps that maturity comes from constant management of such feelings or perhaps those feelings become lessoned with experience.
It is however so dominated by the individual's circumstances and sense of self that it is very difficult to make sweeping generalisations about it. It seems to me that some people's experience with depression is intrinsically associated with their growth into adulthood. Thus even if all auxiliary problems are solved they remain depressed as though the act of growing up is itself the problem. Ofcourse as an adult there are a multitude of socially identifiable problems (alcohols, drugs, gambling, violent abuse etc) that can act as an expression of such feelings that a child perhaps doesn't have access to.
Parents, teachers etc. should obviously do all they can if a child seems to be suffering from some emotional or mental problem. I've seen all sorts of problems amongst my peers, anorexia, self-harm, drug abuse and who knows what else that you can't see. And frankly the support they have received has not often helped them. Once they become adults and the concern of teachers and others disappears the problem invariably becomes worse. It does all seem like a "cry for help" rather than a physical or physiological problem they can't control and even after the problem (if there was one) that caused such actions have been removed, the crying can become such a habit that it continues.
Frankly, I think the vast majority of people with such problems should be told to buck up and in no way indulged. The world will continue whether you are in it or not so you either take responsibility for your problems and take charge of solving them (i.e. reach adulthood) or shuffle off. That I am afraid is the 'real' world. Being a depressive can be quite an expensive business, maybe that's why so many middle-class kids suffer from it?
and the Nobel Prize for Care and Understanding goes to Craig, for his inspirational work "Man up or Fuck off".
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