Walking through the halls or sitting in a classroom full of high schools students, there is never a day that I don’t hear the saying “kill me now” or “ I wish I was dead.”

People these days don’t take sayings like that seriously until someone who was really suffering takes action. Today depression it a big deal. About 20 percent of teens suffer from depression before they reach adulthood, Kevin Caruso executive director of Suicide.org wrote. Some students feel safe talking to the people around them when they’re not feeling their best ,but others may not be able to say the same.

According to school nurse Laura Salivar if someone is sad for more than two weeks then you should start to worry.

”Everyone can feel sad but when you really need to be concerned is when it lasts more than two weeks,” she said.

According to counselor Amy Armon the most important thing that you could do for someone who is battling depression is be there for them. You may not be a doctor or therapist but you are their friend, and they will need your help. Depression makes people feel hopeless or gives them a sense of despair, so you should try to comfort them and make them feel like they are the most amazing person in the world.

With depression it may be hard for people to work, study, eat, and even enjoy being around friends and family. If you try to help them but they push you away then you need to go to someone else who can help them.

“If they push you away, continue talking to them from a different perspective,” Health teacher Jane Griesenauer.

Even with all the help that you try to give it may not always help. Sometimes people need medicine to help them because their depression is due to a chemical imbalance in their brain. Talking to them can’t fix that so they take medication to try level it out said Griesenauer said.  

According to Armon there are lots of things that people can do to help lessen the weight of the depression but in the end it will always linger in the back of their mind.  She said clinical depression can strike once or several times in a person’s life, so it is important to make sure that they have a safe place or safe person to go to when they start to feel down.

Things like sports, writing, reading, or drawing can help as a way to relieve whatever they are feeling.

“Spending time outside helps and being active can’t hurt,” Armon said.

Depression can run in families when the chemical imbalance is involved but sometimes the reason for depression is that something significantly big happened in that person’s life and they were severely affected. Those feelings can sometime disperse in time but unfortunately that memory will stick with them for the rest of their life just like a physical injury but emotionally. When things like this happen some people do not understand how or why it has affected that certain person so badly and they will brush it off but that is one of the worse things to do Salivar said.

“ Treat mental illness like physical illness. Everyone should be treated equal,” Griesenauer said.