Fighting Depression and Finding Your Purpose: A Guide for Teens and Others

When you’re suffering from depression or other mental health issues, it can be difficult to get anything done. You may find yourself staring off into space, feeling as if nothing matters, or that you need impossible amounts of energy just to get up and start working. You can feel frustrated by your work, angry at the path that you’ve taken in life, and even find your work intimidating and overwhelming.

The sometimes irrational symptoms of mental illness can be exacerbated by real situations, of course. Sometimes we really don’t love our work or school assignments. Sometimes we feel that we could be doing more good somewhere else. It’s especially easy to feel this way as a teen when so much of life can be confusing and stressful.

If you’re going to get the most out of school, work, and life, you need to recognize the ways in which your mental health can affect your trajectory in life and work to address your mental health issues and find your real purpose and calling in life.

Depression and a 'Lack of Direction'

Depression is often associated with a lack of (perceived) effort and direction in life. If we look at a list of the symptoms of depression, it’s easy to see why. This symptom is a frustrating one, especially for teens, who are so often told that they’re supposed to be defining their futures.

Depression results in low energy levels and feelings of hopelessness and despair. Depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions are far from just extreme feelings of sadness or stress. Rather, they are distinct mental health conditions that affect our physical health and manifest themselves in all sorts of ways in our daily lives. When you feel burnt out, tired, and miserable about your work and your career, that’s not necessarily your fault.

Mental health conditions tie directly in with our work or school lives. If you’re not careful about your work-life balance, you could easily find yourself suffering from burnout, a mental health condition caused by too much stress and work. It manifests itself as a lack of energy, willpower, and effectiveness at work.

Seeking Help for Your Depression and Other Mental Health Issues

If you feel as if you haven’t found your direction in life and as if your career is not fulfilling you, the solution is not necessarily to quit your job or to pull up stakes and move. Your first step should be to look inward and address your mental health needs.

Start by taking a self-evaluation, or skip right to seeing a trained mental health professional like a therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist. With the help of a trained and experienced therapist, you can start to examine your own feelings and symptoms. You may also want to consider inpatient care, the mental health experts at Polaris Teen Center suggest. Lots of great recovery centers specialize in particular areas, such as teen mental health.

With therapy and, perhaps, medication, you may find that what was causing your feelings of malaise was inside of you all along.

Of course, some frustration with career choices and professional lives are founded in real-world facts. That’s why you should think of your choices as well as your mental health.

Finding your calling and define your own success.

As you re-examine your career arc, your school, and work life, consider the advice of some of the most successful people in America—such as respected New York City attorney Howard Fensterman. Ask a traditionally successful person how to become successful, and they’re likely to ask you what, exactly, you mean by “success.”

Take some time for introspection and decide how much the traditional trappings of success mean to you. Are you pushing too hard for a particular kind of academic or monetary success? Consider the benefits of work-life balance and other non-salary forms of compensation, and ask yourself how important it is to you to do something that you believe in. Your big college and career questions may begin to answer themselves.