Mental Health Issues In Canada

The issue of mental health in society today, seems to be getting worse each year. 1 in 5 Canadians will experience some sort of mental illness and 34% of Ontario high school students are at a moderate-to-serious level of psychological distress which includes depression and anxiety. This is a serious social change issue that effects everyone’s behaviour and feelings at work or at school. Mental health effects every single person in society, but it especially effects teenagers as they grow and begin the next steps to life; where they face more challenges and higher expectations. These challenges and expectations include the academic stress teens face at school, facing rejection from their crush, and the past and present experience of bullying.

But to become successful, teens go through a lot of stress at school because of getting good grades to get into post-secondary. According to Yadusky-Holahan and Holahan (2016), there are two factors that encourages stress towards teens. Students set high and sometimes unrealistic goals to pressure them to succeed and parents and teachers of talented students exert unusual pressure towards them to succeed. Yadusky-Holahan and Holahan (2016) suggests that, “Peer support is a crucial mechanism for dealing with the stress and subsequent anxiety and depression” (p. 42). Teens do not realize that there are social institutions like homes and schools to help them out whenever they are stressed out. Families are there for teens to provide help with physical and emotional health and teachers help students out on what they are specifically stressed out about. The problem is teens are afraid of being criticized from these institutions of being weak and they believe they will be pushed to work harder, increasing the level of stress. Teens need to believe that these institutions are willing to help them out, but teens accept the fact that they are willing to succeed with extreme amounts of pressure around their

But their No. 1 fear is being rejected from their crush because they do not want to be heartbroken that their crush does not have the same feelings for them. According to the Teen Health and Wellness website, “Sadness is another natural reaction to rejection and many people find relief after a good cry.” It continues on to say that feeling sad for too long, can result in clinical depression. Some of the symptoms for depression include feeling hopeless, worthless, or guilty most of the time, not able to concentrate or make decisions and thinking a lot about death and/or suicide. This shows the power of what rejection can do to a person. It leads to ultimate depression that can take a while to recover. When this happens, teens should heavily rely on the social institution of family as they can help out what these teens are going through. Instead, many teens avoid getting help from social institutions because they feel ashamed and they know no one will understand what they are going through. This is a problem that is being shown in society, where teens are ashamed and afraid of coming forward with what they are feeling and being rejected by their crush is one of the issues that teens face in their