As I was walking around the halls of my high school my senior year, I noticed a huge difference between my peers’ mental health in comparison to when they were in elementary and even middle school. In elementary school people were happy, excited for school and to learn and create. As soon as high school hit, everyone felt awful. But it was not because of school work alone, people became paranoid. Everything that they did in public could potentially be recorded, thus having the potential to ruin their lives. They also became self aware of how much they wanted everyone to like them and be proud of them, and in turn posted everyday constantly about their lives and timing it just right so that they could get the most amount of likes that they could. These trends are continuing with the teenagers of today who have not grown up yet and are not showing any signs of stopping.
The feelings that come along with being paranoid can rapidly consume one’s everyday life, especially a mentally unstable teenager who is aware of what they are feeling but can not seem to grasp how to help themselves. This in turn leads to copious amounts of teenagers being diagnosed with depression as well as numerous other mental illnesses. The culprit of these awful mental illnesses is the amount of technology that has been given to teenagers at such fragile ages. They are growing up with social media accounts and ways to ruin people’s lives with a single touch of a screen. Depression is cutting into people’s lives at alarming rates, especially in the younger generations and it is to no surprise why. Teenagers are afraid of not fitting in just as they always have been, except now it is exponentially easier to exclude those who are different. All one has to do is look online for anything that has been posted about that person, or the lack thereof. Either way, it is detrimental to a teenagers help and it is all because of technology and its prevalence at such young ages.
