Depression is on the rise in kids—but the signs are hard to recognize
An increasing number of kids are struggling with depression, often when they're too young to communicate what they're feeling. Here's what you need to know.
His parents call it “the Grey Dude,” the dark persona that overtakes their sweet son, Nicholas, telling him hateful things about himself and clouding him in despair. When a depressive episode sets in, everything is filtered through this smog, and the pain becomes so unbearable that he wants to escape this life.
Before the Grey Dude arrived, Suzi and Mark Spelic had a playful, curious kid who did well at his school in Hamilton, Ont., and loved to draw, build models and practise karate. Suzi says Nicholas was born with what she calls “an engineering brain.” He was smart and inquisitive. “He noticed everything and always wanted to know how things worked,” she says. Sure, he was sensitive and a little shy—in social situations, he’d wait for other kids to approach him—but he seemed happy. But as Nicholas got older, his busy mind seemed to turn on him. When he was six, he began worrying about things most kids his age were oblivious to—everything from what his classmates would think of him to the possibility that someone could break into the house and kidnap him.
Over the next two years, there were more signs of trouble. At birthday parties, he’d shut down and want to leave. When he was upset in class, he’d bang his head against his desk, and at night he’d wet the bed or have night terrors. If he forgot a move during a karate routine, he’d run off the floor and tell his mom he couldn’t do it. “I’m going to fail. Everybody’s looking at me, and I’m stupid,” he would say. The negative self-talk began to seep into everything he did, with Nicholas routinely declaring that he hated himself.
The words were crushing to Suzi and Mark. Parents are conditioned to want to take away their child’s pain—from an infant’s cry to a scraped knee, they are there with cuddles and Band-Aids. But no amount of comforting could quiet Nicholas’s feeling that he was worthless. “My husband and I always say to him, ‘We just wish you could see what we see,’” Suzi says. “But it’s just one of those things where no matter what we say, it doesn’t take his pain away.”
It’s heartbreaking when a child so young develops depression, but Nicholas is not alone. Though most of us think of mental health disorders as an adult problem, 70 percent of them begin in childhood and adolescence. While only about two percent of kids experience depression before their teen years, that number jumps after puberty. And kids are experiencing depression earlier and in greater numbers than before. In the US, the number of 12- to 17-year-olds who dealt with a major depressive episode increased from 8.7 percent in 2005 to 11.3 percent in 2014.
Everything from genetics to bullying can contribute to depression, but many experts are making connections between the rise of the mental illness with the increase in kids’ use of screens and social media. The trouble is, young kids often don’t yet understand their emotions or know how to express them, which can make it extra difficult to notice when the Grey Dude first arrives. And yet it’s vitally important to catch the illness in these formative years, before the darkness takes hold.
01Recognizing the signs of depression in kids
Nicholas’s depression seemed to settle in when he was in grade two, but at first, all the signs pointed toward a physical illness. “He was getting stomach aches and really bad headaches and not wanting to go to school,” recalls Suzi. Though depression is a mental illness, it’s not unusual for kids to experience physical symptoms, like tiredness and tummy aches, or changes in their eating or sleeping habits.
When a child is suffering from depression, they might withdraw from their friends, begin performing poorly at school or experience a change in activity level. While adults with depression are likely to become lethargic, kids are more liable to be hyperactive, says Robert Bancroft, the advanced practice clinical leader of social work at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto.
