We always encourage parents to have regular conversations with their teen children to create secure bonding, but new research suggests that talking with depressed teens about how things can get better can help them cope better with their circumstances.
David Yeager, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, wanted to find out if telling teens who are depressed, many of whom thought things will always be bad, that things would get better would reduce high depression rates among teens. So he conducted a study to test his hypothesis.
“The study divided 600 ninth-graders into two groups. Half participated in a brief intervention program designed to help them understand that people and circumstances can change. These teenagers were shown several articles, including one about brain plasticity, and another about how neither bullies nor victims of bullying are intrinsically bad.”
“The students also read advice from older students reassuring them that high school gets better, and they were asked to draw from their own experience and write about how personalities can change.
Nine months later, the researchers checked up on all the students. Among those who didn’t participate in the intervention, rates of depression symptoms such as feeling constantly sad and feeling unmotivated rose from 18 percent to 25 percent — about what the researchers expected, Yeager says. The group that participated in this intervention showed no increase in depressive symptoms, even if they said they were bullied.”
“We didn’t want to say something to teenagers that wasn’t believable,” Yeager says. “We just wanted to inject some doubt into that problematic world view that people couldn’t change.”
