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| Teen Mood Disorders |  All people experience feeling of sadness or melancholy every now and then. But there is a point where the ache of sadness grows into permanent and unbearable feeling. It becomes some kind of a mountain of pain to its victim. The most common mood disorders are depression and bipolar syndromes. It has been proved that they strike one in seven of all people.
The Prevalence of Mood Disorders in Children and Adolescents
Approximately 7-14% of children experience depression before the age of 15. About 20-30% of adult bipolar patients say having their first episode of depression before the age of 20.
Statistics reports that two or three thousand out of 100,000 of adolescents have mood disorders. Besides, 8-10 of them commit suicide.
Bipolar Syndrome and Depression
Teen mood disorders are characterized by two main mental conditions. The first one is bipolar syndrome, also known as manic depression. The second one is depression alone. Bipolar syndrome is accompanied by vigorous mood swings that vary from profound sadness and depression to euphoric and manic behavior. Depression involves profound prevalent sadness and feelings of desperation. All these feelings are penetrating and don't disappear in proper time.
Teenagers and adults who experience mood disorders cannot cope well in society. Depression forces them to experience a loss of interest and lack of enjoyment in their life. A person with bipolar disorder experiences the manic swings that can create a destroying impact on all aspects of their life and the lives of everyone around them.
Bipolar disorder divides in two types:
- Bipolar I – this type of bipolar disorder is a classic form of manic depression with full manic episodes and major depressive episodes;
- Bipolar II – this type of bipolar disorder involves major depressive episodes and hypomanic episodes.
Since an essential part of those suffering with manic depression do not have full manic episodes, the classification was divided into Bipolar I and Bipolar II. Nevertheless, Bipolar II is often a first step to Bipolar I.
Some scientists consider that biological inclination towards bipolarity could be inherited. Nevertheless, not everyone with this genetic inclination gets the disorder. It also seems that depression has tendency to appear generationally. However, it also can appear in individuals without family history of the illness. Researches have uncovered an important factor that the major depressive disorder is associated with a neuro-chemical disbalance in the brain.
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