Did you know that 20 percent of teens will suffer through depression before they reach adulthood? And only 30 percent of teens with depression will get treatment.

  Let me put this into perspective for you. If there are 250 students in each grade at MHS, and 4 grades, that equals about 1000 students. So about 200 students from Montour will experience depression before they are adults. And only 60 of them will get treatment.

  Don’t like that statistic? Here’s another one for you. Every 100 minutes, a teenager commits suicide. From the time you get on your bus in the morning to the time you get off the bus in the afternoon, you’ve lost eight hours. In those eight hours, about five teens will have taken their life.

  So how do we deal with these high depression and suicide rates? Well, in the US alone, 1,503,185 kids age 13-17 are currently prescribed antidepressants. One million teenagers, taking a drug that has no proven benefits, according to Andrea Cipriani, the Editor in Chief of Evidence-Based Mental Health.

  So what’s to blame for these increasing depression rates? Well, there’s stress, of course, with Gen Z kids being the most stressed out generation yet. And there’s also the cause of their parents shielding them from failure and stopping them from building coping skills. But what about their relationships?

  We’ve all heard the common metaphor: high school is a zoo. As a high schooler, that’s dead wrong. If I had to label high school as anything, it’d be a gladiator ring. Just gonna throw a bunch of people together and let them tear each other apart. Sounds like a great idea to me.

  Let’s be honest; high school friends don’t last. Why you may ask? It’s all situational. High school is all situational friendships. But that’s how it has to be, isn’t it? One thousand kids shoved together into a building for eight hours a day, five days a week. By the time you graduate, you will have spent almost 20,000 hours stuck in classrooms and lunchrooms with the same students. There’s really no choice but to make friends.

  And situational friendships don’t last. Think about it. When’s the last time you talked to your chem partner from last year? When’s the last time you texted your friend from geometry who always copied your homework? Yeah. That’s what I thought.

  So high schoolers are forced to form these meaningless “friendships.” Well, we all know how they end. Backstabbing, heartbreaking, the mental equivalent of a gladiator death, just without all the glory and fame and freedom if you win.

  This brings me to my one final question. Society forces teenagers to go to school, spend hours upon hours with these backstabbers, cheaters, and fakes. Society forces teenagers into this gladiator fight that’s proven to kill.
  So how can they still tag all the blame for depression onto smartphones and video games?