It is different from the sadness one feels when one thinks of a rift within the family or the unhappiness associated with the failure to get into the university of your choice. Depression is not a mood or a phase. A depressed person feels that there is something fundamentally wrong with him and his life. He feels incapable of handling the smallest problems. He feels that nothing ever goes his way and that may be he doesn t deserve to be happy.
Depressed teenagers feel that they are destined to fail at anything that they attempt.
They take failure personally seeing it as being directly related to their personalities rather than to anything they might have done. For instance, if they are snubbed at a party by an acquaintance, they will assume that it is because they are boring and not worth knowing. A normal teenager would just shrug it off and move on to the next person. As a result of this defeatist attitude, depressed teenagers rarely make the effort to do anything because they believe that they will fail anyway. They feel that since they have no control over their circumstances and cannot seem to find a solution to any of their problems, they should do something and then forget about it.