Depression affects everyone differently, and anyone can obtain this mental illness at any age.
In 2009, Vivek Bansal, Sunil Goyal, and Kalpana Srivastava conducted the Study of prevalence of depression in adolescent students of a public school that showed that depression affects 2% of children, 5-8% of adolescents, 3-9% of teenagers, and 20% of teens show a lifetime of ongoing depression.
Katrin Lelyushkina, a Carlmont class of 2023 student, was a part of the 5-8% of adolescents that struggled with this mental illness. Depression changes one’s brain to release less dopamine, causing them to have a chemical imbalance due to genetics and events in their life. Lelyushkina had her fight with this mental disorder at a very young age.
According to The Teen Mental Health Organization, depression can affect someone’s social and professional life because the brain is not in control of the person’s emotions. In some cases, depression can be caused by a significant event that caused someone’s life to change negatively, such as the loss of a family member or the stress of school or work. Many people often confuse depression with everyday sadness; however, this is not the case. Depression is much more severe, and it changes the way the person’s daily life is.
Depression comes in episodes that last for a few months until the person is seen as “getting better,” but most teenagers that experience depression will experience more episodes later in life.
At the age of 8, Lelyushkina had a very close relationship with her grandmother that she did not share with any of her other relatives.
“I remember I would sit with my grandma on the porch, and we were having so much fun feeding the chickens in Ukraine,” Lelyushkina said. “Every summer I was visiting my grandma and her village. I would get to milk the cows and drink the warm milk.”
She enjoyed the time that she could spend with her grandmother, but as an ongoing war with Russia started in 2014, she could not visit her grandmother every summer.
“The revolution in Ukraine started, and for four years, we didn’t go to Ukraine,” Lelyushkina said. “My other grandparents lived in a bigger town, so that’s where I usually stay with the rest of my family. Sometimes I would go to the village with my grandma.”
She decided not to visit her grandmother because the revolution was still going on, and her family was only staying for two weeks. She later realized that this was a big mistake.
The next year, when they came back, Lelyushkina’s grandmother would not remember a thing.
Over the years that Lelyushkina did not see her grandmother, her grandmother deteriorated from Alzheimer's.
“We were getting in the car and hugging her goodbye because we knew that the next time we would come back, she’ll have passed away, because we can’t come back again because the revolution was starting up again,” Lelyushkina said.
After Lelyushkina came home from Ukraine, she had to go back to school two days later. This major event in her life changed her behavior toward her classmates and friends.
“I was so mean to everyone; I felt so bad for everyone who went to middle school with me because I was so bitter and mad at everything else because I didn’t understand why she died and why this happened to me,” Lelyushkina said.
At the loss of her close relative, her life changed, and she developed depression, causing her to have suicidal thoughts, which is one of the many symptoms of this mental illness.
“I was so lonely, and I remember being in the kitchen and seeing the kitchen knives and thinking that my life didn’t even matter. No one is even here and no one’s going to care or notice,” Lelyushkina said. “That was probably the worst it ever got, but that lasted for a few months.”
The summer of 8th grade created another stressful period for Lelyushkina because she moved towns and had to leave all of her friends behind. She felt very lonely because she could not make plans with her friends and experienced anxiety for the next school year. Since her grandmother’s death, many events such as moving or quarantine had prevented her from visiting her grandmother’s grave in Ukraine.
During freshman year, she made many new friends at her new school and had many distractions such as sports and school events that kept her busy. As quarantine started, it was difficult for her to keep her grades up, and she was not able to go to swim practice to distract her from the events that happened.
“Seventh grade was the time I started swimming, and it helped me keep my mind off of the stuff that happened, and quarantine was the first time in a while that I didn’t have swim practice,” Lelyushkina said.
Quarantine gave Lelyushkina time to think about her life and everything that had happened in her past, and she became miserable. Too much time it turns out. She started to get suicidal thoughts again, but over the summer, they faded.
At the start of Lelyushkina’s sophomore year, online classes due to COVID-19 caused her to struggle to gain motivation for school and how well she learned.
“I was really mad at myself for having bad grades because this is the first time that I had straight B’s and two C’s,” Lelyushkina said.
The Suicide Prevention Resource Center in their article Consequences of Student Mental Health Issues states that school work can be affected because when a student is struggling with depression, they lose a sense of motivation and concentration. Depression takes a toll on someone’s energy level and their optimism of doing well in school.
Although Lelyushkina had many difficult situations and events throughout her life, she persevered through and made it out the other side. Although she is continuing to manage her mental health, it has improved over the years.
“One thing that helped me cope pre-quarantine was swimming because having a daily activity to get your mind off of things really helps. I thought that that was stuff teachers would tell us to be more active, but it distresses me,” Lelyushkina said.