Adolescent Mental Health
Adolescent mental health problems are more common than most people want to admit. As parents, we want to think that our children are normal, if not perfect. Although this is generally far from the truth even in the most healthy families, learning that you have a child with a severe mental illness can be completely devastating for parents. When my Johnny started having adolescent mental health issues, I would not even admit it to myself. I figured that he was just going through a phase. Nonetheless, when he started engaging in self-destructive behaviors, losing contact with the family, and getting worse and worse grades, I knew that something had to be done. I finally faced my worst fear. My son was not normal. He was a good child, but he needed professional psychiatric care.
Of course, finding a good doctor for him was extremely difficult. In many communities, there is a severe shortage of decent adolescent mental health care. Acute care was alright – there was a hospital that would take him in almost immediately – but finding the sort of long-term care that I really felt he needed was more difficult. Adolescent mental health problems often do improve within a few weeks to a few years, but that still leaves the problem of finding treatment in the meantime. You want the best psychiatrist for your adolescent – someone who can be a mentor and role model as well as an excellent doctor. It has to be a decision you take together too. You need to balance your observations and the opinions of your teenager to find someone who they can really work with.
The psychiatrist that I found was an expert in treating adolescent mental health disorders. He treated teenagers with bipolar disorder, acute anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, and many other health problems. He actually worked on a referral basis with the acute treatment clinic that my son went to, so I got his name after the first doctor didn’t work out. I could tell that my kid liked him a lot, and I held him in the highest esteem. It seemed like the first good break that we had gotten since this whole ordeal began, and I was optimistic that more positive developments would follow.
It turns out that I was right. Basically, adolescent mental health disorders come in two flavors. There are the disorders that are simply the product of adolescents – anxiety, depression, and that sort of thing – and those which become active during adolescence and then don’t go away. If my son had had schizophrenia or some other chronic disease, the prognosis would have been quite a bit bleaker. As an adolescent with chronic anxiety and depression problems, however, he wasn’t destined to face lifelong troubles in the same way.
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