The passage of time has always been so strange to me; always moving, always changing, but never quite in the ways that you would expect.
It’s a paradox I still have a hard time comprehending. How can something be so fast and so slow simultaneously?
I spent much of my adolescence lingering in the past. On the contrary, I found myself so fearful of a future I had yet to experience.
I don’t think I ever truly expected (or anticipated) that I would be alive long enough to progress much further beyond the creeping sense of sadness. It was a profound sense of loneliness that I had resolved myself to. It was a crippling depression that seemed to have no reprieve (apart from the mania of course, but at the time those episodes were few and far between).
Between 2% and 8% of children between the ages of four and eighteen experience depression.
A depressive disorder, however, is much more pervasive.
Suicidal ideation is not uncommon among teenagers struggling with depression. As many as 1/3 who consider it actually make an attempt.
The strongest risk factors are having a depressive disorder and being a young female.
It should be noted that one-third develop bipolar disorder within five years after the onset of depression. For the record, I had my first manic episode when I was sixteen or so.
Sixteen was a tumultuous time for me.
Even though I am ten years older and wiser, I would not go back and tell my younger self that it gets better. It really doesn’t.
But it does get easier.