16 Year Old Son Experiencing Depression and Relationship Stress

Reader’s Question

We have a sixteen year old son who is nice looking, makes fantastic grades, and is on his high school’s basketball team. He has played sports with the other members of his team since he was in first grade. However, when they started jr. high his “friends” started to alienate him. They no longer included him in gatherings, and began to make rude comments to him whenever they found any chance to do so. Now he spends every weekend night at home with us, he does not have contact with his peers all summer, and no one ever calls our home to speak with him or ask him to go out.

He has tried numerous times to ask his teammates what he has done to cause them to treat him the way they are treating him. They just brush it off and laugh. We have tried a couple of times to ask their parents if he has done or said anything to cause their sons to act like this. Naturally, when it first began, we tried to brush it off as a part of growing up. Our son has always been mature, and we tried to tell him that he was just a little ahead of some of his classmates in the area of “growing up”. He says he would never treat anyone the way he is treated, and his teachers have told us that he is a model student and classmate.

Our son is obviously becoming more depressed and angry about this situation, and we’ve had many long talks about what to do. He does not want us to talk to any of his coaches or school principal for advice. We’ve asked him if he would like to see a private counselor, but he says he won’t. What should we do? It is so hard to watch a handsome, intelligent, strong young man sit on the couch and cry. He tells us that he just wants to have friends to hang out with.

Our Consulting Clinical Psychologist’s Reply

If he’s sitting on the couch and crying…he’s very depressed. Adolescents can be very hurtful and they often use “relationship aggression” against each other. He may be targeted for being too mature, too talented, or simply because someone in the group has a problem with him. At times, students with talent become targets of students who want their place in the social group. The depression may get worse if left untreated.

I’d recommend several things.

1. Look for an alternative social group for him. This may be through a church, social group, taking a class in an area of interest, taking a college class, etc. While we often think of his “peers” as his classmates, he actually has peers throughout the community — they’re just in places other than his school.
2. Ask him to read information about depression available on this website and perhaps my website at www.drjoecarver.com. If he’s interested in medicine or other treatment options, he can read my Chemical Imbalance article.
3. Obtain information about counseling options in your community. Discuss those with him.
4. If he’s socializing with the family — be social. Create more than weekend-in-front-of-TV activities.

Remind your son that high school is not the “best time” for many students. Some high school most-populars have rather boring adult lives. Other students who live in the shadows in high school have tremendous adult careers. Being popular for four years in high school is not as good as being happy for over 50 years as an adult. He can view high school as a passage, necessary to move through before college and a career as an adult. In my 36 years in clinical psychology, no one has ever asked me if I was popular in high school.

PS: I was a band-geek.