Psychiatric Nurse’s Role in Adolescent Depression Prevention

Abstract

Depression is a mental health problem that affects individual, family, society and the country. It can occur in all genders and ages, and often involves emotional, thinking, physical, and behavioral abnormalities with symptoms of depression, downheartedness, boredom, discouragement, hopelessness, lack of concentration, pessimism, feeling of unworthiness, isolation, appetite and weight loss, and insomnia. Adolescents are prone to depression due to life-impacting problems including personal, familial, educational, and bullying ones, etc. As a result, their failure to adapt themselves or to cope with such problems may cause depression. In particular, the adolescent depression is considered to be the top priority to be addressed because improper or incorrect treatments of depression-related sufferings faced by them may lead eventually to self-harm or suicide. Therefore, the psychiatric nurse’s role in adolescent depression prevention concerns knowledge and understanding provision, promotion of awareness among adolescents and their families, searching and screening of all adolescents, increase of protective factors, while, at the same time, reducing the predisposing ones, doing of research and introduction of innovations or programs as a tool for adolescent depression prevention, building of engagement of families, educational institutions, and communities in adolescent problem prevention, as well as performing of proactive works in collaboration with multidisciplinary team to provide adolescents with timely assistance. All these can prevent new adolescent depression cases and recurrence of depression.