»Introduction

Hi there!

Welcome to our project Teens Tweakers!

Our Project aspires to tweak out prevalent stress and depression faced by teens during their teenage.

Before we proceed and introduce to you our project and our team closely, let's first know the topic deeply.

So let's first start from the word "Teenage".

So, what is Teenage?

It is the age period of life between 13 to 19 when an individual start becoming familiar to the outside world. This age period brings many changes physically as well as mentally and is also called 'transition stage of life'. More simply, 'a biological stage between childhood and adulthood'.

The word "Teenage" or "Teen" is derived from numbers ending from -teen i.e., thirteen-fourteen-nineteen etc. 

"Stress And Depression In Teens"

An Important Social Contention

Depression is known as one of the most common mental disorder. Whereas "stress is a body's nonspecific response to a demand made on it" - Selye. It is a body's normal reaction which can be seen easily in everyone at certain situations. Everyone experiences stress at different levels through the whole of their lives. But when stress becomes frequent and prevalent then it often leads to depression, if left untreated. Research says that depression is the most common causes of suicide in teens. According to World Health Organization (WHO), suicide is the third-leading cause of death in elder teens (15-19 years)

Let us now look at some stats presented by some well-known organizations of the world:

• According to the World Health Organization (WHO), teenagers group is the highest risk group for suicide in approximately 33 percent of countries around the world.

• The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that one suicide attempt occurs approximately every three seconds, and one completed suicide occurs approximately every minute.

• According to the American Psychological Association (APA), approximately 20% of teens face depression before they complete their higher educations.

Isn't the research shows that how risky this is for our society?

Don't you think some authentic steps are needed to be taken to control these issues? 

If this continues to happen, don't you think future generation will be insecure?

And consequently, can we think of a bright future of our society?

Don't you think, the teens should be mentally fit as they are the upcoming building blocks of the society?

So let's prevail upon together to tweak this extensive real world problem!

'Stress and Depression' or 'Stress or Depression': A Big Chaos

Most of the people think that stress and depression both are corresponding words and have almost same meaning. For instance, we included this question in our survey-

"Stress and Depression both have almost same means: True/False".

We were surprised to see the result! 37% teens agreed with this statement.

Beside this, our survey responses were clearly giving us an image of this big confusion. The incidents for depression, suicides etc that most of the teens shared, were related to day-today stress instead of depression. Most of them messed stressful events with depression events. In order to guide them about the basic differences and their relations, we took this as one of our target.

To be honest, when we started this project we too even do not know the difference between stress and depression. Our coach explained a little bit about it and told us to do a small research on it. Then after some time we came out with its big difference.

However, continous stress can lead to depression and causes of stress and symptoms are common in depression which we will discuss in project later on, still Stress and Depression both have some big differences just like there is a difference in a feeling and condition. Hmmmm...not yet cleared??. Let's clear the difference and understand both the terms very simply.

You must have understood now, that how and to what extent these two terms are different from each other.

We are using the word 'Prevalent Stress' many time, do you know what is it and how is it different from stress? Well, you can check out the page 'Stress - Fight or Flight Response' to know about it. In that page, You will find another intresting fact that stress is actually a good thing for ourselfs! Do not believe? Then go check out the page and know how is it so.

As we know that teenage is followed by childhood. We all in our childhood used to be very naughty, playful, stupid and the most important, "free from worries". When we entered in our teenage, suddenly things got changed and the one, who used to be the tension-free person, now face the crucial stage of life with so many worries. In this case what should one do? It takes some time for that teen to adapt in those changes and in this time the teen can be easily caught up by the monsters of Stress and Depression. Thus, yes, according to us the teenage is not that easy, in fact it is hard... As by the time when we reach or adult age, we become addicted to these worries and are fully adapted with the changes. We also start becoming responsible and matured enough to tackle the problems. Whereas it's not the case in teenage. The teenage period is being referred to as 'Formative years'. We can think about it same as a slab of clay. The clay changes its shape according to the force applied. Same is the case in teenage. Entering the teenage brings relatively drastic changes like hormonal changes, physical changes, social pressure etc in them which sometimes become quite discomfortable for some teens to adopt the changes. Thus there is a need to help teens guiding in spending their teenage in a fruitful way. Being teenagers, its our discernment. To know the views of our target audience, we included the following question in our survey:

“It's Hard to be a Teen”, you ________ with this statement:

 (Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree and Strongly Disagree)

More then half, i.e., 57% teens agreed with this statement whereas 43% disagreed

Check out the pie chart below, it represents the above observation that about more than half the teens believes teenage is a challenging experience of life.