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Depression and Anxiety tend to go hand in hand. Although there are many versions of these disorders in general the dominant feeling in depression is sadness and the dominant feeling in Anxiety is fear. In practice, when you struggle with one there's a high chance you're experiencing the other. Sadness and fear are necessary and healthy human emotions that have essential functions. Things go wrong when teenagers either don't know how to express these feelings, think it's not a good idea to express these feelings or haven't really had the chance to. When this happens feelings of sadness and fear cannot be properly digested and therefore cannot be properly addressed. Private feelings of unexpressed sadness and fear that accumulate over time reliably produce depression and anxiety. In their extreme forms both depression and anxiety are dangerous and stifling. Depression can get so bad that teenagers can make the tragic choice of ending it all with suicide. And Anxiety can get so intense that it results in a generalized pattern of avoidance that drastically reduces the possibilities of living a full and fulfilling life. 

Counseling treats depression and anxiety by creating a therapeutic situation that helps teenagers recognize and express the backlog of feelings that give rise to these disorders.  As teenagers learn the benefits of full and honest expression in therapy they start relieving themselves of the built up emotional pressure. This allows them to start thinking more clearly about their feelings, putting together the dots, understanding the historical patterns and extracting useful lessons. Layer by layer they understand, heal and grow. My job as a psychotherapist is to facilitate this natural process, to help them along when they get stuck, to explain, interpret, educate and to be a person for them that is felt to be trustworthy.

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Below is a straightforward list of the typical symptoms of Depression and Anxiety that can help you to identify if your teenager is suffering from these disorders.