A friend of my parents told me that one of his teenage daughters, a high school student, had been consistently down in the dumps this past year, showcasing some classical signs of clinical depression. So he and her mom took the girl to see a naturopath, who immediately took her completely off refined sugar and restructured her diet in other ways.

As spring began a few weeks later, the daughter was feeling healthier, more positive and stronger than in years and seemingly back to her old happy self, says Dad. He gives the credit to her new diet and adds, “With the rush to treat ‘down’ kids with drugs, there may be other better and far less expensive alternatives.”

Young adults and teenagers have so much going on emotionally and psychologically that parents should first of all take pains to sort out whether a child is in fact depressed or simply going through the usual struggles of their age bracket.

“If you have a teenager who’s socially reclusive, or at least more withdrawn at home, more sullen at home, mood swings … those may be signs of depression, but they also are very much signs of being a teenager.”

Prescription drugs should definitely not be the first call to action in treating depression in teens or anyone else. “The literature’s pretty mixed on how effective medications actually are in treating depression.  The problem with medication, is that it doesn’t even begin to address to root causes of the depression.
Acupuncture has been demonstrated to be very effective for many conditions; it can be effective for anxiety and stress management under certain conditions.

What is needed is a full evaluation by a professional who has experience with both clinical depression and adolescents and who is trained in cognitive behavioral therapy.