Quick Checklist for Warning Signs of Teenage Depression

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My life as a woman of fifty has been riddled with depression. My mother, my grandmother, my sister, my son, and myself have all suffered from depression at one point. I suffered from teenage depression myself, but I still didn’t see the warning signs that my own son was suffering from teenage depression. Use this quick checklist for warning signs of teenage depression to help yourself be aware that something you may see as laziness, for example, is actually depression in your teen.

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Please note: I am not a mental health professional. I am a trained nurse, so I have some experience working with those with mental health issues. However, I’m writing this post from the standpoint of someone, a mom, who has lived through her son suffering from mental illness, and now is healing, plus my own personal experiences with teenage depression. Always seek help from a qualified mental health professional. That help is invaluable and could save their life.

Quick Checklist for Warning Signs of Teenage Depression from a mom of a depressed teen boy and what can be done to help.

Isolation Can Exacerbate Teenage Depression

Covid isolation hit all of us, and especially kids, hard. Many suffered delays and stunted growth, even damage and trauma, developmentally, socially, mentally, and physically from the isolation that was mandated by our governments and schools. This is seen in all ages today and has ongoing negative consequences.

Many teens self-isolate themselves. What’s normal teen self-isolation and what’s isolation that is concerning?

This can be tough to discern.

But warning signs of teenage depression can also look like normal teenage behavior and fool those around the teen. We were fooled. We thought our son’s continued self-isolation was inevitable due to Covid restrictions, online school (which deemed he be in his room for classes), and normal teenage behavior. It was not. It was something more, and something much worse–it was severe depression, and he was hiding it.

I have both personal and professional life experiences with mental illness. I’m trained as a nurse. I’ve suffered teenage, and other depression, myself. My mother had depression when I was a teenager and ended up committing suicide. I’ve been surrounded by depression my entire life from various members of my family. But I still didn’t catch the signs of my son when he was depressed. Mental illness can be sneaky.

I thought what he was doing was pretty typical teenage behavior, maybe a bit more extreme perhaps than my other boys, plus it was Covid times, so many things weren’t ‘normal’, but we had no idea how severe he was. There were some things that he was doing that seemed like normal teenage slacking, but also blatant depression, that we saw in hindsight, but that were actually signs of depression. We didn’t know, we were clueless, but I want you to know and be aware, so I’m sharing our journey.

Common Warning Signs of Teenage Depression:

Here’s the quick checklist, then scroll down for more explanation.

Dirty dishes in their bedroom
Clothes not hung up, not washed, not well cared for
Increased self-isolation
Pulling back from family and activities (this can be typical teen moodiness)
Insomnia at night
Eating more
Eating less
Not going out with friends
Monotone answers
Rushing back to their room when grabbing food or water
Not engaging in pleasantries or pleasant small talk
Short answers to questions
Looking like they just want to get away when approached
Staying up all night to do something, like gaming, then sleeping all day
Poor grades or school performance, especially if new
Quick to anger or flee when asked a simple question
Saying they aren’t hungry at mealtimes
Defiance
Substance abuse
Not wanting to do age-appropriate things, like driver’s ed, driver’s road test
Quitting their job
Not caring
Wishing they were dead, saying others would be better off if they were dead
Hopelessness
Feelings of worthlessness
Low self-esteem
Excessively messy or cluttered room
Damaging walls or furniture
Anxiety
Not meeting direct eye contact
Not greeting others when entering a room
Not showering or slacking on other activities of daily living
Forgetting to take prescribed medications

Best Advice to Parents: IMPORTANT!

Visit your pediatrician annually OR if you have concerns, even sooner. Make a doctor appointment, even if you have just minor concerns or just want to check up on your child’s mental health state. Your child may just tell the doctor something they are hiding from you. Pediatricians are trained to ask the right questions too.

An annual physical is literally how we found out how severe our teenage son had fallen into depression. It very literally likely saved his life. It was the tip of the iceberg to the dark, painful, and difficult road we were then headed down, but it was our smack in the face that this was going on literally under our noses.

Answering the questionnaire in the pediatric clinic brought our son to tears when he spoke alone with our doctor, and thankfully, alerted our doctor to the very seriousness of our son’s mental state. Our son was already hurting so deeply, and we hadn’t known. It was a horrible feeling as a mom. What we thought was normal teenage behavior, and that brought on by the albeit abnormal COVID isolation, was much more, and much, much, much worse.

The Skinny…What can you do as a parent?

Get your child to the pediatrician to answer screening questions on the worksheet assessment of mental health.
Enlist your pediatrician to talk to your child if you are at all worried, and even as a routine check for those showing zero signs. Kids hide things. People hide things, especially when they are hurting or avoiding the hurt.
Ask your child how they are doing, feeling, or if they are worried about anything.
Watch for people pleasing behaviors, which can be a sign of a coverup.

Longer Checklist of Warning Signs of Teenage Depression with more explanation:

A buildup of dirty dishes in the bedroom may be more of a sign of depression than typical teen laziness or focusing on other things. We literally just thought our son was being lazy, but we then found he also had zero energy and no motivation, he just didn’t care, and even getting out of bed to go to the bathroom, shower, or get food was difficult for him. So, the dishes piled up.
Self-isolation isn’t always about a teen wanting to just spend time alone in their room. Try to figure out if what they are doing is just being a typical teen, or is it something else. This can be hard to determine, and may fluctuate.
Wanting to eat meals in their room can also be a sign.
Not engaging as much as usual with other family members.
Loss of interest in activities they used to enjoy.
Not wanting to leave the house.
Not showering or not doing activities of daily living such as brushing teeth. Some of these activities are hard to monitor in a teen or child who does these things independently because they aren’t being monitored.
Eating more. Weight gain.
Eating less. Weight loss.
Not exercising.
Not going outside.
Not contacting friends.
Not accepting help from friends or family members when it’s offered.
Not talking much, or being overly quiet.
Short, curt, or monotone answers to questions.
A change in behavior. This is a tough one to assess because this can change as they mature, or go through a rough patch, which may just be that… a rough patch, and not depression at all. But, it can also be depression.
Anxiety.
Sudden social anxiety or a change in social behavior.
A belief in unrealistic viewpoints. Depression can have elements of other psychosis with it, or false beliefs.
Refusing to go to school.
Obviously, not caring about things they used to or a shift in caring about things. This can be suble too.
Saying they aren’t hungry at mealtimes so they can stay isolated. This can look like getting food at non-mealtimes to avoid interacting with family members.
Wishing they were dead, saying others would be better off if they were dead. For Christians or religious people, this could even look like the child saying that they’d like to die because heaven seems so much better, so why not die to go live in heaven with God? For instance, the teen might say, ‘Life sucks here. Why not go live in heaven where it’s wonderful and God loves me? Why should I stay here? I hate it here.”
Thoughts of death or suicide, and obviously, attempts are a red flag: GET HELP! Go to the emergency room. We did that and they launched the team to help us immediately.

Solutions We Tried to Help Our Depressed Son:

I will write a longer post on this, but here’s the short answer:

Outpatient Mental Health Hospitalization Programs (four different ones)
Multiple therapists until we found the right one
Multiple medications, changes in meds, dosages, types, etc.
Alternative school settings
Unconditional Support, including accepting the declarations of their feelings and just being there without offering solutions or sharing our worries as parents
We kept on inviting him to join in family activities, without any expectations that he had to join in
Providing a stable home environment as best we could
Told him we were never giving up on him
Shared past stories of other family members who suffered from depression, including any stories of suicide without sugarcoating
Mini car trips to get out of the house, even if just for a drive, or to get a drink at the gas station, go through a drive through at a fast-food restaurant, a coffee shop, or for ice cream, just doing something out of the ordinary like buying homemade soap at a specialty store and smelling the different aromas, getting out of the car to smell flowers, anything to get back into the world a bit, and even just see other people.
Go to a park, walk around, feed wild ducks bread.
Not judging
Being patient, very patient and valuing even the smallest baby steps towards any signs of recovery
Accepting that there will be setbacks and relapses, but focusing on the overall big picture and seeing and acknowledging healthy improvements
Allowing him to make his own decisions and not taking that from him because he’s mentally ill (ie. in terms of approaching adulthood)
Give him a gift or plan something he’s excited about
Don’t apply the same expectations to him as we would a mentally healthy person, but still…don’t count him out either

Keep Hope:

I sincerely hope this post has helped you. Your child is a complex person living a complex life. Mental illness can add in so many hard to navigate complications. I plan to write more on this topic. Please visit this post as well: Confessions of a Depressed Teen, I Survived Teen Depression

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https://www.juliehoagwriter.com/

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Isolation Can Exacerbate Teenage Depression