Running head: STRESSFUL ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS CAN LEAD TO

Stressful environmental factors can lead to depression in adolescents

Christopher M Mitchell
PSYCH/610
12/12/2015
Dr. Deborah Suzzane

STRESSFUL ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS CAN LEAD TO

Stressful environmental factors can lead to depression in adolescents

Statement of the problem

Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) says the meaning is something we

discover rather than invent, and we must find it for ourselves. We find
it though living, and specifically through love, creating things, and the
way we choose to see things. Living in today's society seems to be a
tough task for many people, adults are affected by factors such as job
loss, economy, raising children and relationships. So many people
have stress, and the cause of stress is multi-dimensional. Working in a
behavioral hospital has me thinking, why adolescents find it so
difficult to deal with common factors that affect their lives. Many
adolescents are taking residence in behavioral institutions with issues
like depression and social anxiety, and if you would take a look in their
life, you will see that the depression and anxiety are caused by
environmental factors that we all deal with, can environmental factors
and stress cause depression and social anxiety among adolescents?
According to Cummings, C. M., Caporino, N. E., & Kendall, P. C. (2014),
among youth with depression, anxiety disorders are the most common
comorbid mental health disorders, with a comorbidity estimates

STRESSFUL ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS CAN LEAD TO

ranging from 15% to 75%. It is so easy to say that adolescents are

just too young to deal with the stressors of the world, but that would
be a dismissive statement.
It's much more than that, and the environment in the early
eighties was simpler and societys adolescents did not have to deal
with as many environmental influences that the kids face today. The
stress of environmental influences are plentiful in today's world,
Television, and Social media makes it impossible for adolescents to
slow down and rest. The demands of school and after school
activities coupled with bullying makes it impossible to maintain a
particular type of sanity.
Purpose of the study
The minds growth is what establishes a persons behavior, personality, and
direction, but what happens when the mind has not been developed. This
research appropriate because of what happens at birth and the teenage
years, teenagers seem to have a hard time identifying with the self. To form
a reason it is difficult for teenagers to cope, one must start at the beginning.
John Locke (1632-1704) states that the mind of a newborn infant is a tubla
rasa, or blank slate, on which experience writes (Moshman, D. (2002).

STRESSFUL ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS CAN LEAD TO

The paragraph above states in laymens terms that a child is born with no knowledge of the
world, thus saying that the childs mind is then imprinted based on what he/she was exposed
to at the start. Research on the over activity Rasa has been deemed extreme among empirical
thinkers, but the child learns from the environment and then the development takes place.
What has been noticed during the research process is that the already built environment of a
newborn baby is exposed to, he/she becomes a product of that environment. If the home is
decimated with drug use, physical and mental abuse the child has no chance of a normal life,
he/she then becomes a victim of that negative environment. Francoise Dolto (1908-1988)
states, "It is too late to make a difference with adults, the work has to be done with children.
We begin to aid the development of the child at an early age and if not the child becomes a
teenager as a result of an adverse environment. The question in a person mind is what
happened during the teenage years that caused the teen to become stressed and then
depressed? My answer is the surrounding environment that's hard to deal with because many
teens are unable to cope with the ever increasing world around us.

Population and procedure

This research is a quantitative research, and that's because it is somewhat
of a narrowly based research and the focus is more on the gathering and
counting of numbers. Each question has a number range of 1 to 10, with ten
being the worst amount of stress.
The population if interest for this study is all adolescents with behavioral
issues residing in a U.S. city. The population that happens to be accessible

STRESSFUL ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS CAN LEAD TO

in this study consist of young clients at a behavioral hospital. The sample

consists of 14 adolescents, seven males, and seven females. My
employment began in the month of January the year 2015 and have been
assigned to the adolescent unit, the unit is appropriate at this time for the
study because most kids are struggling with real-life issues, the conflict
seems to have control over the youth at the most crucial time in their life.
Keep in mind that its not always an even number of genders, on different
occasions, it can sometimes be two males and 12 females, or vice versus.
On average, study participants were 12 years and older, many of whom are
still in school and then there are some who are not in school. The population
also consist of adolescents who are gay and lesbian; the different genders
do not impact the study at this time. This is because stress and depression is
not gender bias. The principal purpose of this study was to determine the
environmental stress factors and how those stress factors can influence
depression.
This study began with an implied focus on detailed observation. Observing
the daily lives of people can reveal the possible influences of stress. An
example is that if an adolescent who is a patient at the hospital for bullying,
it would be considered that the adolescent may have an issue with
aggression (aggressive behavior). Carefully monitoring the teen, we tend to

STRESSFUL ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS CAN LEAD TO

notice that the teen begins to bully the patients at the hospital by taking
advantage of the less mentally stable and then we have to separate that
person from the others.
There was a noticeable amount of depression of so many adolescent, as a
matter of fact the adolescent unit deals with teens who are depressed and
have a hard time dealing with depression and the factors that lead to
depression. The factors mentioned means that at home, school, work, and
play and the pressure becomes so compounded because there is no safe
environment and then depression settles in. The primary objective is to
identify the stress factors in all environmental influences and that it leads to
depression.

Methods
The pre-test probability in this study is that teens have stress, and the stress
will lead to depression, the likelihood Ratio is that after the given test, the
study would identify the different levels of stress and show that there is no
escape from stress, and when there is no escape, it grows bigger and
unmanageable.

STRESSFUL ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS CAN LEAD TO

The methods used for this research would be Quantitative Method. This
method is used when trying to quantify data and generalize the results, and
since this research is used with a particular type of the population and a
questionnaire coupled with observation, this would be the best option.
According to the ethical principles of psychologist and code of conduct, 4.02
Discussing the limits of confidentiality: a) Psychologists discuss with persons
(including, to the extent feasible, persons who are legally incapable of giving informed
consent and their legal representatives) and organizations with whom they establish a
scientific or professional relationship (1) the relevant limits of confidentiality and (2) the
foreseeable uses of the information generated through their psychological activities. There
was an informed consent form that the participants signed, before the experiment. The
participants were given all information concerning the research; the participants agreed that
their names not be used, and since this is a behavioral hospital there is also an adherence to
the health insurance portability and accountability act of 1996 (HIPAA). The HIPPA law
ensures the protection of a patients identity while at the hospital.
The patients were in their daily classroom receiving group therapy from the staff members.
During this time the patients are relaxed, so I felt this was a great time to implement the
research by handing out the questionnaires. The staff member and I had a discussion the day
before concerning the research, so it was no surprise to anyone at this time. The staff
member did an excellent job using the issues with stress as a class discussion beforehand, so
the patients were not caught off guard with the implementation of the questionnaire.
Design/test

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The survey research is commonly used when collecting data about a population of interest,
and in this case, the interest are adolescents and the most proper design would be a
questionnaire with series of closed-ended questions. Closed-ended questions are
predetermined responses from which the participant can choose from, in this case, the
choices are numbers from 1-10. On the questionnaire, I wanted the member to provide
general information concerning their gender and before the questions, age, gender, and type
of school were provided by the participants on the questionnaire.
The questions are not wordy but very general and to the point, from my experience working
with adolescents too much information can cause more anxiety before the test questionnaire.
An example of questions provided was: "On a scale of 1-10 with 1 being the lowest stress and
10 being the highest pressure, Rate each source of stress in your lifeHomeSchool. The
adolescents had somewhat of a review concerning stress and depression from the staff
member on hand, so the research was part of the overall discussion in class. They started
taking the research and was pretty comfortable with the questions and they were able to
answer each question with no problem.

STRESSFUL ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS CAN LEAD TO

Hypothesis
If an adolescent is affected by stress in all of their environments, the stress
can effectively turn into depression. The Independent Variable (IV) is stress,
and the Dependent Variable (DP) is the adolescent. In this study, the
different stressors in multiple environments can cause the adolescent to fall
into depression. If there were no high levels of stress in most of the teens
environment, then there would be no major battles with depression.
The results of this experiment can open future doors in adolescents and
depression. This study takes a look at 13 environments, and these are the
environment that the adolescent is exposed to on a regular basis like home
and school). When an adolescent becomes stressed out at school, then they
come home to de-stress in an environment that is supposed to offer rest for
the Mind, Body, and Spirit. Depression can also be missed if the primary
presenting problems are unexplained physical symptoms, eating disorders,
anxiety, refusal to attend school, a decline in academic performance,
substance misuse, or behavioral problems (Thapar, A., Collishaw, S., Pine, D.
S., & Thapar, A. K. (2012).
The above statement is the reason that this research is important, because
depression can be missed in adolescents and because the primary problem
issue like physical symptoms, or eating disorders that are true to a certain

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degree, but it seems no one looks at the multiple environments. As adults

when we become stressed out, we take breaks from our lives. We go
hunting, fishing, shopping, and all other adult themed outlets are used to destress. My question is where do the adolescents go to de-stress? When the
home is stressful, and school seems to be a place of herding and just trying
to stay alive how are the teens taking this mentally?
One study suggests that the lack of association between post-task stress appraisal
and physiological stress reactivity suggests that adolescents might have low selfawareness of physiological, emotional arousal. Our findings further suggest that
adolescent stress appraisals are based largely on their performance during stressful
situations (Rith-Najarian, L. R., McLaughlin, K. A., Sheridan, M. A., & Nock, M.

K. (2014).

Graph and Results

STRESSFUL ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS CAN LEAD TO

Chart Title

AVG.

10
8
6
4
2
0

ENVIRONMENTS
FEMALES

Location/Situatio
n
HOME
SCHOOL
MONEY
WORK/PLAY
GRADES
CLASSES
FAMILY
FRIENDS
HEALTH
SPORTS
TEST
RELATIONSHIP
TIME
UNHAPPINESS
AVERAGE
STRESS

MALES

FEMALE
S
MALES
5.7
7.14
7
6.57
5.28
6.14
3.28
5.57
6.42
7
6.85
7.42
6.85
7
4.25
7.28
3.71
7.14
1.71
5.85
7.85
6
7.57
5.85
7.71
7.85
7.42
5.71
7

8.28

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Discussion
The chart shows the average of the female and male adolescents. Each
persons level of stress (1-10) was averaged out, and the chart shows the
average number of each category and overall average between male and
female.
After receiving the results from the questionnaire things became convoluted
because I wasnt trying to research the difference between females and
males, but it was glaring and in plain sight after the results. Extraneous
variables are undesirable variables that influence the relationship between
the variables that an experimenter is examining. The difference between
Females and Males influence the outcome of the experiment but are not the
variables I'm interested in at this time. This study is helpful because if we
(society) can focus on alleviating the stress from those environments, then
we can reduce the high levels of subsequent depression from our
adolescents.
The issue concerning the experiment using adolescents in a behavioral
hospital, is that the reliability may be weak, because the adolescents could
have been circling answers flippantly just to get it out of the way. If

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conducting an experiment in the future I would use the same instrument

which is a questionaries but for an extended period of time and concentrate
of the levels of depression. In future experiments it would be wise to
continue therapy in the process just to see if some levels of stress are
lowered and see how it would affect their depression. If one would
concentrate on the results received from the adolescents, they will notice
that adolescents deal with stress in any environment and there is not a
peaceful environment to relax in. The average stress levels in females is 7
and the average in males is 8.28 and this implies that stress seems to be an
issue and they have no way of releasing the stress in a therapeutic way.
Parents are charged with the responsibility to protect and insulate the teen
from outside stressors and if so it creates a containment of stress, thus
lowering the levels and preventing clinical depression among teens. Brady
and Kendall (1992) concluded that although anxiety and depression in youths are
meaningfully linked, there are important distinctions, and additional research is
needed (Cummings, C. M., Caporino, N. E., & Kendall, P. C. 2014).

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Conclusion
Stress -- whether chronic, such as taking care of a parent with Alzheimers or
acute, such as losing a job or the death of a loved one -- can lead to major
depression in susceptible people. Both types of stress can result in over
activity of the body's stress-response mechanism (Bruno, K. 2015). The

above paragraph mentions real life instances that can cause stress,
and if not remedied, then it can turn into pretty bad depression. The
study also performed reveals that the adolescents have no way of
escape or any other options to breathe freely and deal with current
stressors, that may have them afflicted.
G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924) says that at adolescence, the
evolutionary momentum subsides; this is a time for individual change.
During this wild, lawless time, teenagers are increasingly sensitive,

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reckless, self-conscious, and prone to depression. The child then

emerges as an adult; a more civilized, higher order being.
Adolescence years are the most difficult and it is by exposure to the
world that the child learns to be an adult, but when not checked
properly or in this case the stress levels are not lowered the teenager
experiences depression and that in it of itself is very hard to deal with,
when your still trying to alleviate stress at the same time.
Parents should use this time to eliminate the stressors at home, this
will ensure a safe haven from the world and all that wrong with it.
Adolescents with chronic illness may have a more difficult time in
school if they have to deal with hostility or criticism (Phillips, PhD, R.).
The same goes for stress and if the adolescent deals with stress at
home and then at school, parents will then see the true struggle of
depression. Like the patients admitted at behavioral hospitals all
across the country they have nowhere or no one to turn to and stress is
a well-known risk factor for both internalizing (mood and anxiety) and
externalizing (behavioral) problems (Zandstra, A. R. E., Hartman, C. A., Nederhof,
E., van den Heuvel, E. R., Dietrich, A., Hoekstra, P. J., & Ormel, J. (2015).

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Reference

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