Hope: Light in the Darkness of Depression
A few weeks ago we had our annual counseling conference at BCC. This year we had a special Youth and Young Adult track titled Pathway to Life. In this track we covered 5 main topics which we are now going over during our IMAGE Sunday School class. Next week’s topic will be “Hope: Light in the Darkness of Depression” so I wanted to discuss it a bit more for our youth parents this week. According to online statistics, “Depression affects about 20% of adolescents by the time they become adults.” Along with this, “Teen suicide is the third leading cause of death in youth 10-24 years of age in the United States” 1 These statistics are serious and many claim both to still be on the rise. All that said, this is a very relevant topic to be thinking through as we seek to shepherd our children not just through big life decisions & actions, but also their inner thinking & emotions. In our conference discussion we used Webster’s definition of depression as, “…marked especi...