More than moodiness

For 17-year-old Jiang Yu (not her real name), the breaking point came a year ago when she found that the flash disk, on which she stored homework, was missing before she was about to leave home for school.

At first, she became nervous and anxious, but suddenly a single thought seemed to question her reason to live: "If I cannot do anything right, what's the point of life?" Jiang was overcome by uncontrollable sobbing, then screaming, and she locked herself in her room.

Over the following month, she spent most of the time in bed with the curtains drawn. Lying in the darkness, she felt loneliness engulf her like a tide. She was diagnosed with severe depression, and tried to return to school, but was not ready.

"When I first met depressed teens, I couldn't understand some of their behavior, such as inflicting self-harm, until I got to know a 17-year-old girl with severe depression and bipolar disorder who had to leave school," Sheng says.

The year before quitting school, the teen had been able to study from 6:30 am to 9:30 pm, but by the end of the semester, she found she had learned nothing and when she tried to harm herself with a knife, she felt relieved, according to Sheng.

"What everyone thinks is fragile and abnormal is actually an attempt by these children to try to survive. When you need to feel pain to relieve your emotions, it means that almost all other methods of dealing with emotions have failed. The wounds, the actions, are actually a silent cry for help," Sheng says.

People often say in China that depression is "a cold of the spirit", and while for Sheng, this may help remove the stigma about depression, she also feels it is a bit too frivolous.

"These adolescents suffer from physical pain, and emotions that are difficult to deal with, and have a strong sense of alienation and helplessness. A lot of teens tell me that when they are barely able to go back to school, they need to expend a lot of energy to support themselves and appear 'normal'. But inside, they feel like they're not, which is like standing on an isolated island in a crowd," she says.

Sheng has firsthand experience of depression and knows that it can hit anyone.

"At first, it was insomnia and a pain in the shoulder and feeling anxious all the time. For more than a month, I tried to adjust myself through jogging, but it didn't work. When I got the diagnosis of mild to moderate depression in 2016, it was a mixed feeling, because on one hand, I understood the cause, while on the other, I didn't want to label myself with the disease," says the former reporter from the Beijing-based media group Caixin.

In 2019, she went to the London School of Economics and Political Science for a master's degree in anthropology. In 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she was trapped in London and provided online consultation for depressed teenagers on Dogo, a Beijing-based self-help and mutual assistance community for patients and their families.