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FEW PREDICAMENTS ARE SO HEARTBREAKING as that of the teen-ager whose world seems shattered and who is inconsolable in his grief. His distress has been touched off by some very real, very acutely felt loss—loss of a loved one, loss of self-esteem, loss of a dream, even loss of an image he had had of himself (Toolan 1978); (Ostrov and Offer 1978). Sustenance seems gone. Life appears bleak. Helplessness has replaced what had been enthusiasm about his present and optimism about his future. As real as they are, these phases are often short-lived (Turns 1978). Growth, in body and experience, is extraordinarily rapid, and highs and lows tumble over one another as the young person adjusts to the changes.
As adults we sometimes paint a bitter-sweet, oversentimentalized picture of adolescence, remembering its excitement, forgetting some of its pain. So we tend to minimize the severity of the turbulence in the adolescent we know. With bemused paternalism we characterize his moody swings as cute or over-wrought, we use platitudes to euphemize his felt despair, or we substitute sympathy for empathy because we don't want to experience his anguish.
We are all familiar with the television version of the post-pubertal boy or girl whose gropings are exaggerated into histrionic, pseudo-adult posturing, which peers greet with strident solicitude, and adults with self-righteous and patronizing banalities, false good cheer, and sly, knowing looks. The stereotype may work in a situation comedy, but there is more to real adolescent depression than this. Suicides and the suicide rate have accelerated among the 15 to 24 year olds in the last two decades (Petzel and Cline 1978). The young cultist, the dropout, the delinquent, the promiscuous,