Adolescence is a time of mandatory turbulence. But there's more to teen doldrums than growing pains, warns the author of a new study on adolescent depression and anxiety – and its insidious effects can range from poor test scores to threats to school safety.

“Many people see teenage mental problems as just stigma, just growing pains, but adolescent psychology needs to be taken very seriously,” said William Hale, an assistant professor at the Research Center of Adolescent Development, Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

In the wake of of Derrion Albert's murder, high school violence has become a hotly debated national issue and the focus of budgetary and legislative measures to keep teens safe. Dana Grube, the guidance counselor at the Chicago High School for the Arts, agrees – and said that under the current system of inadequate mental health treatment in public schools, what is astonishing is not the numbed brutality teens are capable of – but that it does not occur more often.

The White House and the City of Chicago have allocated funding for increased police presence and safety measures. But according to Hale, whose study appears in the October edition of The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, said the real origins of the problem lie in a misconception of the widespread nature of adolescent mental issues. He aims to combat the notion that anxiety and depression should be lumped into one problem, which follows the larger societal problem of stuffing teenage mental issues into inaccurate categories.

“When these diagnoses are simplified and adolescent mental illness already seen as illegitimate, it makes it difficult to discuss effective measures, or even have a discussion,” Hale said. “And the reality is that teenage mental problems are widespread and treatable.”

He also said that simply scientifically labeling teen behavior can be misleading. “I'm afraid that many studies have separated pathologies so clearly – specialized anxieties, panic disorders – that they are made to seem exclusive and only affecting a select few.”

Grube, a licensed clinical professional counselor, said she sees a layered institutionalized failure by Chicago Public Schools to provide adequate counseling and treatment.

She believes that explosive mental problems often begin with a lack of recognition. “The onset of serious mental issues often looks like acting out, or angry outbursts, and because teachers don't know better, and the system doesn't know better, it typically gets treated on a discipline level rather than clarifying mental illness, or therapeutic services,” she said. “Teenagers are treated as defiant and given detention, which can progress the symptoms.”

To receive help from a trained psychologist is a lengthy and arduous process, Grube said. Since counselors cannot legally diagnose or even recommend mental care, a student needs six weeks of documented failed intervention following a diagnosis of emotional disturbance for the school's case manager to refer that student for psychological evaluation. Teens, meanwhile, are left with the diminutive light of adolescent introspection to work through their personal darkness.

The red tape is a result of understaffing, Grube said, and an illustration of a system rendered toothless by underfunding. “My experience as a therapist and as a schoolteacher is there are not enough services for kids in the school system. As my school's only counselor, my job is not only recruitment, scheduling, college applications, and course help, but meeting with them individually and trying to help them evolve as people and deal with these crises,” she said. “I'm the only person doing that for them. And yet most elementary schools don't have school counselors at all."

Further complicating high school mental health care is the wanton rebelliousness that stamps adolescent-adult relationships. Authority is not to be trusted, especially not with the fragile vulnerabilities of teenage identity. Psychologists, at the end of this long bureaucratic road, are seen as unfamiliar members of an uncaring institution, Grube said. And so teens are alone, and suffer secretly, until, perhaps, they break.

“Before the test scores, we are losing kids who don't feel like anyone is listening. And they won't make it to the ACT, or junior year, because the emotional comes before the cognitive,” Grube said. “The bureaucratic approach is to be reactive, to deal with issues like Columbine when they happen. But Columbine situations are right here, right now, and I'm surprised they don't happen more often.”

But the same porousness of psyche, which lends such weight to life's strain and trauma, also allows for rejuvenating emotional and personal growth, she said. With steady counseling and emotionally based education, teens can be furnished with assurance, gilded by compassion. Nurturing relationships and trust can be built. They can learn to feel unalone.

“Teens should feel like they have a safe place to go,” she said.”We can, and should, give that to them.”