Disease sweeping the nation

Towards the beginning of the year my whole world was turned upside down by a terrible disease that makes it difficult to get out of bed in the morning, drains your energy, makes socialising extremely difficult... The list goes on.
The worst thing is, I know so many people who have suffered from this, and it's a little thing called depression.

First off, if you deny that this exists and believe people can "snap out of it" you are living in the dark ages. Depression is real and sadly I know more than 5 teenagers that have suffered from it in the last year. To me, that seems shocking as I can't think of any other illness that I've known so many people affected by. However, I do believe that although maybe depression itself can't be stopped, severe cases could be prevented by (and I know it sounds cliche) education. And not just wishy-washy PHSE classes and documentaries about it, hard-hitting facts and more importantly, practical advice on what to do to help or even maybe just how to prevent triggers etc.

Because thing is, from my experience I find that school can often create/worsen the problem. I know that personally, things became worse due to a huge amount of pressure from both school and my family, meaning that I was terrified of failure, but too terrified to do anything about it. So I have one piece of advice for schools - chill the hell out a bit. In my school we are forced to listen to a barrage of positivity to do with careers and future plans constantly, which although may be intended to help, often works the opposite and increases pressure on young people. I'm not saying that schools should allow students to run riot and not push them to do their best, but often making students lean towards university and not promoting success stories of non-uni students or people who attended university later can cause people to make choices they don't want to. I think it's important to emphasise that students still need to socialise in order to relax and sometimes cut students some slack if things are clearly too much for them.

I also believe that practical advice is something schools desperately need to give, because as a 16 year old suffering from this disorder or knowing someone who is, Google and common sense are the only pieces of information teenagers dealing with this have to rely on.

If a friend confronted you saying they were suicidal, what do you do?

It's easy to look at it in another circumstance and say "tell a teacher, tell their parents etc..." but what if they beg you to tell no-one? What words do you use to convince someone you care about to go to the doctors?

I may be slightly more clued up now, but before having to deal with circumstances like this I had no idea what to do or say, and with cases of children with depression and mental disorders getting increasingly younger, it's important that people know what to do. Rather than simply telling kids what depression and mental illness is, people need to scratch the surface and ensure people know what other options there are than just "telling a teacher." (Although this can help, it's dependent on individual circumstances.)

Because sadly, 10% of cases of depression end in suicide, and it's not fair that a chemical imbalance or learned pattern of behaviour or whatever you believe to cause it should kill people, EVER.

Just because something's not physical doesn't mean it can't destroy a person.

Social Media Army

Hey everyone,

Firstly - extremely sorry for huge delay in posting anything. Sorry :( 

This is something I've noticed for a long time, and I've been guilty of too, but recently it's really started to bother me and I feel like this is the time I may be able to put what I'm thinking into words for once. 

When someone is upset, it is 100% right to support this person, but what always seems to happen with twitter and facebook is that their friends start a barrage of tweeting and posting statuses, most of the time because they just want to be involved and not to genuinely support this person. And this my friends, is what is commonly known as shit-stirring. And sure this is annoying, but the bad thing is it seems to build up a sort of army against the other supposedly offending party, and  whether what they've done is right or wrong, from first hand experience, having loads of people being against you, it's shit.

Being on the receiving end of one of these "armies" starts to make you feel as if you are alone and regardless of what you've done it makes you feel incredibly guilty. And having lots of people refusing to listen to your point of view because they want to jump on the bandwagon of someone else's problems can make you feel as if your feelings aren't valid or important, and let me tell you that they always are. The lady I saw yesterday because of reasons said something to me that has really stuck in my head: "you feel these things, and regardless of whether you should or shouldn't, you do, and that's that." Which I completely agree with, I think anyone feeling anything has the right to feel that way because feelings aren't fake, you cannot make yourself feel a certain way, so why do some people think that their feelings have higher importance than other peoples? No! 

What I'm trying to say is that these groups of people who use twitter etc. to group together to rant about other people cause people to think that they're unimportant (whether they're in the wrong or not) because they only take into consideration one person's feelings. People make mistakes, that's why maths exams and huge companies take into account human error. Be more forgiving and shit-stir less, everyone will thank you for it.

Jess xo