«It does Justus good when he can talk to someone»

I tell

"When we moved here to the Bern area three years ago, we were actually all delighted. We both had good new jobs, the children quickly made friends at school and Justus even brought home a couple of boys from his new handball team in the first week. He also fell in love pretty quickly, if you can call it that at the age of twelve. In any case, there was a girl, Kaja*, with whom he did a lot of things and she was also part of his new clique. That went on for maybe a year, I think, then Kaja was with us less and less and we found out through our other son that she was now probably with one of Justus' friends. When we approached Justus about it, he reacted completely defensively. I then left him alone. It seemed to me that he was in good hands in his sport, he was still travelling a lot, nothing had changed.

«We forced our son to go to a counselling centre. He was diagnosed with mild depression there.»

Then one day his teacher called. Justus and a few of his friends had been caught smoking pot on the school grounds. At the age of 13! It also turned out that Justus hadn't been going to handball for a long time, he had lied to us. We were completely thrown for a loop by this breach of trust. I was very angry, also because he completely refused to have a clarifying conversation. We first tried talking to him, then we tried being strict. We forbade him to meet certain friends and he had to be home by 9pm at the latest at the weekend. But he didn't care about any of that, he simply ignored it. Our relationship deteriorated rapidly, we somehow couldn't connect with our boy anymore. A friend of ours pointed out to us that he might be depressed. We spoke to the school psychologist, who also thought this was possible. However, Justus didn't let us talk to him at all. We cut off his pocket money completely and forced him to go to a counselling centre with us. In retrospect, I'm not very proud of this action, but we simply didn't know what else to do.

Luckily for us, he found the psychologist there quite okay and he realised that his behaviour might have something to do with the fact that he wasn't doing so well mentally. He was diagnosed with mild depression. He has been undergoing therapeutic treatment for just over a year now. He himself often says it's rubbish, but we have the feeling that it does him good when he can talk to someone. He seems more balanced to us and even we manage to have a normal conversation with him from time to time."
*Names known to the editors
**For the «Depression» dossier, Gabi Vogt was allowed to stage a photo series with the Wirth family from Zurich. The people shown are not connected to the texts in this issue. The photographer has already realised several dossiers for Fritz+Fränzi.

Read more about depression:

• Depression: shadows on the soul
  Puberty is a time of change. Mental illnesses such as depression occur more frequently at this time. An estimated 10 to 20 per cent of all adolescents suffer from this mental disorder at some stage. How does depression develop and how does it manifest itself? What warning signs should parents look out for and when do they need treatment?
• «Is it always going to be like this, this life?»
  Stefanie* passed her A-levels this summer. Anyone who meets the upbeat 18-year-old won't believe that she has suffered from depression since childhood.
• «The number of suicide attempts has risen significantly»
  According to child and adolescent psychiatrist Gregor Berger, 90 per cent of victims suffered from a mental illness such as depression in the year before their suicide. He advises parents to talk to their children about this at the first sign.