Teen Boys’ Use of Antidepressants Drops

Antidepressant use among teens has skyrocketed during the pandemic. I mean, if you look at the first number.

Monthly antidepressant prescription rates for young people jumped 66.3 percent from 2016 to 2022, and the number prescribed by doctors between 2020 and 2022 increased by 63.5 percent compared to 2016 to 2019. .

However, there is more to the story. There was a surprising increase in antidepressant prescriptions for girls, but the proportion decreased for boys.

Antidepressant use among male teens decreased from 2020 to 2022 compared to 2016 to 2019, while there was no significant change among young adult males ages 18 to 25.

Data for girls showed a different picture. Overall, antidepressant prescriptions for teenage girls increased significantly by 129.6 percent between 2020 and 2022 compared to 2016 and 2019. Young adult women also saw a dramatic increase of 56.6 percent.

But what exactly accounts for the strikingly different mental health realities for teenage boys and girls?

According to some experts, it may not be the case that teenage boys experience depression any less than teenage girls. In fact, you may face social stigma for reporting it.

“Boys may feel pressured not to express their emotions outwardly and to conform to traditional masculine norms of “being a man” and “being strong,” which may reduce their desire to seek emotional or psychological support. They can be lost,” said Camille Tenerife, who is married and has a family. said a therapist at Diversity Therapy in Los Angeles. Newsweek. “Girls, on the other hand, are more encouraged to express their emotions and are sometimes classified as emotional, which helps them communicate their feelings.”

Tenerife said boys and girls often express their pain differently. When a boy’s anxious or depressed feelings manifest as aggression, many adults may miss the signs that they need psychological help.

Karen Cunningham, an Alaska-based marriage and family therapist, said boys have been isolated and alone with their emotions for so long that when a pandemic hits, it’s not as uncomfortable for them to deal with. It is highly likely that there was no such thing.

“Little boys learn how to ‘be a man’ early in life,” Cunningham said. newsweek. “In fact, by the age of four, most boys have internalized that men don’t cry, don’t rub dirt, are strong and tough, and don’t disrespect what is generally considered feminine or soft. ”

Meanwhile, she added that girls usually have to accept “femalehood” by the age of 12 and are usually not punished for expressing their emotions.

“If you don’t tell anyone, no one will know you have depression,” Cunningham says. “Think of a young man sitting alone in his room feeling a certain way, and knowing he shouldn’t feel that way but feeling ashamed for feeling that way. There is.”

Talking about your feelings of depression to a trusted adult, such as a parent or teacher, may feel too out of reach.

“They’re not necessarily going to contact their parents,” Cunningham said. “Maybe they don’t know that there’s no need to be so vulnerable in life, and that there is deep shame in feeling vulnerable and sad.”

Overall, younger generations, especially women, are less likely to feel socially stigmatized for talking about mental health issues and are therefore more likely to seek therapy or psychiatry. Psychologists say that.

Prescribing antidepressants was an easier solution for people who waited in long lines to receive virtual psychotherapy during the pandemic, and may have contributed to the overall uptick.

Even before the coronavirus outbreak, mental health issues among teenagers were becoming widely publicized. But the social isolation and uncertainty that gripped young people and separated them from their friends took a toll, and many have not recovered since.

Nicholas Hardy, a psychotherapist who also runs the podcast Untherapeutic, said virtual learning may have had a bigger impact on girls than boys.

“The pandemic has dramatically changed traditional learning,” Hardy said. Newsweek. “The once reliable structure of in-class learning has become more fluid and unpredictable. Girls, on average, perform better than boys in this type of learning environment, so they are forced to I think girls experienced more negative effects when they went online.”