Everything you ever wanted to know about teen depression is on the Internet. Just type in the words “teen depression,” and it’s all there. In a website entitled Teen Depression, I found the following:
Depression is the most common mental health disorder in the United States among teens and adults, and can have a serious impact on the lives of the many teens who suffer from depression.
Teen depression can affect a teen regardless of gender, social background, income level, race, or school or other achievements, though teenage girls report suffering from depression more often than teenage boys. Teenage boys are less likely to seek help or recognize that they suffer from depression, probably due to different social expectations for boys and girls — girls are encouraged to express their feelings while boys are not. Teenage girls’ somewhat stronger dependence on social ties, however, can increase the chances of teen depression being triggered by social factors, such as loss of friends.
Note that the depression suffered by these teens is serious enough to require medical intervention, which generally includes psychiatric therapy and taking drugs to alleviate the mental pain caused by depression. Apparently there are also many depressed teens who manage to cope and don’t seek medical treatment. Some of them commit suicide to alleviate the pain of being alive.
Here is a list of symptoms of teen depression as given on a website for the drug Abilify:
Sadness most of the day
Low energy or fatigue
Loss of interest in favorite activities
Feelings of hopelessness and/or pessimism
Difficulty concentrating
Irritability, restlessness, or being slowed down
Feeling worthless or guilty
Trouble sleeping or sleeping too much
Significant weight change
Thoughts about suicide or dying
Thoughts about suicide or dying. But that’s what the schools teach. They teach about death and dying. Children write their own obituaries in school. They are told there is no God and that life is purposeless. If a child is taught that his or her life is no more significant than a cat’s or dog’s life, that will make one feel pretty worthless.
Atheist schools even destroy the joy of Christmas by banning any mention of Christmas in the holiday season. The students are supposed to celebrate the “Winter Solstice,” which is probably what the worshippers at the Stonehenge celebrated.
The fact that neither parents, therapists, nor educators will even admit that removing God from education can produce depression is a sign of how spiritually perverse our society has become. Teachers of death education admit that teaching about death and dying, and the writing of obituaries can cause student depression. But that doesn’t seem to bother them. Indeed, over 50,000 American teenagers have committed suicide since the introduction of death education in America’s public schools.
According to Education Week (10/31/84), there were 18 teenage suicides a day in the United States, about 6,570 per year. A more recent statement about teen suicide was given by The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry:
Suicides among young people continue to be a serious problem. Each year in the U.S., thousands of teenagers commit suicide. Suicide is the third leading cause of death for 15-to-24-year-olds, and the sixth leading cause of death for 5-to-14-year-olds.
Teenagers experience strong feelings of stress, confusion, self-doubt, pressure to succeed, financial uncertainty, and other fears while growing up. For some teenagers, divorce, the formation of a new family with step-parents and step-siblings, or moving to a new community can be very unsettling and can intensify self-doubts. For some teens, suicide may appear to be a solution to their problems and stress.
Depression and suicidal feelings are treatable mental disorders. The child or adolescent needs to have his or her illness recognized and diagnosed, and appropriate treatment plans developed. When parents are in doubt whether their child has a serious problem, a psychiatric examination can be very helpful.
Note that suicide is the sixth leading cause of death for 5- to 14-year-olds. The idea of child suicide was unheard of before the schools became atheistic. It is true that family dysfunctions can depress a child, especially if that child has no recourse to God, because the school told him that there is no God, just as there is no Santa Claus.
Everybody wonders why there have been so many shootings and massacres in schools and elsewhere, so many teen suicides, and so much self-destructive behavior among teens. But the obvious is too unbelievable to atheist-humanist America. Simply put, Godless education leads to depression.
Death educator Nina Ribak Rosenthal, in an article entitled “Death Education: Help or Hurt?” which appeared in The Clearing House of January 1980, wrote:
Death arouses emotions. Some students may get depressed; others may get angry; many will ask questions or make statements that can cause concern for the instructor … Students may discuss the fact that they are having nightmares or that the course is making them depressed or feeling morbid. … Others may have no reactions or feel a great sense of relief that someone finally is talking about the things they often felt they could not say. Others may become frightened. In fact, Bailis and Kennedy report that secondary students increased their fear of death and dying as a result of participating in a death education program.
Depression, fear, anger, nightmares, morbidity. These are the negative emotions and reactions stirred up in students by death education. Is this what parents want their children to experience? Is this why they send their children to school so that they can learn about death rather than life? However, according to the misguided Ms. Rosenthal, simply because death education can cause such emotional turmoil and anxiety is no reason not to teach it. “Since death has been such a taboo topic, open and honest communication is essential. Such communication,” she writes, “helps to desensitize students to anxiety-arousing items.”
Thus, the purpose of death education is to “desensitize” children to death — to remove or reduce that reasonable, rational, and useful antipathy toward death that helps us preserve our lives. It is when children begin to see death as “friendly” and nonthreatening that they begin to be drawn into death’s orbit and lured to self-destruction. It’s a phenomenon that might be called “death seduction,” in which an individual is drawn irresistibly into a fascination and then obsession with death. The individual begins to disdain life and love death.
Atheist schools play with fire. They play with the emotional lives of their students and are nonplussed when the students act up. According to an article in Education Week (12/14/88),
A nationwide poll of 22,000 public-school teachers sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has revealed a disturbing picture of the problems teachers encounter in their classrooms.
Nearly 90 percent reported disruptive behavior and student apathy to be serious problems in their classrooms. Almost 70 percent identified theft and vandalism as problems in their schools, and 50 percent said that alcohol and drugs were problems. Ninety percent complained about lack of parental support; 44 percent were concerned about violence against students; and 24 percent they considered violence against teachers a problem.
That’s a perfect picture of what happens in a school without God. Violence, vandalism, theft, apathy, drugs — and add to that suicides, shootings and massacres, plus low test scores and children who can’t read and you get an idea of how serious the problem of Godless education has become for this nation. None of the reform programs offered by the establishment addresses any of these problems because the establishment refuses to acknowledge the need for biblical religion in education.
When I was attending public school in the 1930s and ‘40s, the principal read the 23rd Psalm at every assembly. That was enough to inform the student body that there was a God and that He protected us from evil. The curriculum was a solid one based on traditional teaching methods. We learned to read with phonics, write in cursive script, learned the arithmetic facts by rote, and learned about our history in chronological order.
All of that is gone today, and the educators refuse to go back to the methods that worked and the biblically-based morality that governed the schools. Thus parents have no recourse but to refuse to put their children in atheist schools and either teach them at home or enroll them in decent private schools where religion can be taught.
Computer technology has made homeschooling the most effective form of education in America today. But 85 percent of American children still attend public schools, sent by parents who have no idea what goes on in those classrooms. The very decent parents of the two Columbine killers had no idea what the school was doing to their sons.
And when children come home from school depressed, parents have no idea why. The school is never blamed, so there must be something wrong with the children. If a child can’t learn to read, it’s not the fault of the school’s teaching methods, it’s the fault of the child who was born with a learning handicap. If schools hand out condoms to teenagers, they are not contributing to the delinquency of minors, they are protecting them from a sexually transmitted disease and unwanted pregnancy.
It’s time for American parents to wake up. Atheist schools are a danger to the health, safety, and emotional lives of their children. These schools should either be abolished or reconstituted as genuine institutions of learning in which God is acknowledged as the Creator of the universe and all of life in it.
