Anticipating your child’s needs becomes increasingly challenging over time. Teen mental health issues are as complex as adult mental health problems, and it’s important for parents to stay informed. Building a supportive environment can significantly aid in your teen’s mental well-being. Understanding signs of emotional distress, fostering open communication, and seeking professional help when needed are all important steps.
For some teens, adolescence is not just the onset of puberty but the possible onset of anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges. The teen years can be just as challenging for parents as they are for kids, especially as your teen’s emotional needs change and develop. While you might feel overwhelmed and unsure of how to best support your child, know that you’re not alone – and that there are plenty of resources for both parents and teens to better understand and overcome mental health challenges.
This guide provides information and practical solutions to help your teen navigate their mental well-being. By staying informed and being proactive, you can play a crucial role in your teen’s mental health. Let’s explore the steps you can take to ensure your teen receives the care they need.
Understanding Teen Mental Health Treatment Options
Surveys and studies show that today’s teens are more anxious, more depressed, and lonelier than previous generations. While teens today face the same challenges adolescents have always faced, their stressors are accentuated by factors unique to the modern world, such as social media.
In the US, emergency room visits related to mental health conditions have gone up dramatically among teens. More than half of teen girls self-report as “persistently hopeless” versus about a third in 2011. Paradoxically, teens today are more generally aware and educated on topics of mental health than their parents or grandparents were, but they are worse off emotionally.
Can mental health treatments address these rising challenges? The emotional and behavioral pressures of large, societal issues affecting teens and their parents alike – whether it’s a global pandemic or multiple recessions in succession – cannot be resolved through generalized mental health programs.
But for individual teens struggling with specific behavioral problems, negative thought patterns, and actionable symptoms, bespoke teen mental health treatment plans do work. As such, calling attention to the availability of teen mental health treatment resources is crucial.
Teen Mental Health Treatment Today
Evidence-based approaches to mental health problems combine talk therapy with pharmaceutical interventions, lifestyle changes, and skill-building programs.
For example, teens struggling with high levels of suicidality best respond to therapeutic frameworks such as dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). Meanwhile, treatment programs such as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) have proven very promising for trauma-based conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Modern antidepressants (SSRIs) boast fewer side effects than previous generations of similar drugs and can even help treat adjacent conditions, such as anxiety
In addition to medication and therapy, modern treatment plans incorporate family members. Teens live with their relatives or caregivers and spend most of their time with them, so ensuring a supportive home environment is important. This may mean educating parents and siblings about teen mental health treatments and ways to help improve treatment outcomes or utilizing family therapy sessions to address how familial relationships might be negatively affecting a teen’s well-being.
A holistic, individualized approach can help teens with mental health conditions identify and control their negative thoughts, positively affect mood and cognition, and improve other markers of health that relate to mental well-being, such as physical health, social health, and self-image.
Recognizing Teen Mental Health Issues
Teen mental health treatment plans help teens with mental health disorders lead happier, healthier lives. But at what point does a teen need help?
We live in a time of great mental health awareness, which is a massive boon. Uncovering the extent to which people have struggled with post-traumatic stress, depression, or anxiety for decades without treatment or recognition – or worse yet, with heavily internalized stigma – has been transformative. However, one of the biggest challenges in the landscape of modern mental health treatment is differentiating between the normal human experience and a pathology that requires some form of professional psychiatric intervention.
Not all forms of anxiety need to be addressed through one-on-one therapy, and not all forms of sadness indicate the need for a prescription of antidepressants.
Learning more about mental health problems can clarify why they’re prevalent. It can also help people recognize them in loved ones and themselves. But a greater understanding also risks pathologizing normal negativity, or feeding unintentionally negative cycles that reinforce negative thinking into becoming disordered.
In other words, avoid self-diagnosing mental health issues in yourself or your loved ones. If you’re concerned about a loved one’s behavior, talk to them. Lend them a shoulder. Listen to them. It’s healthy to feel upset during upsetting times, and it’s normal to be worried when there’s a cause for worry.
But when a teen’s behavioral and mental changes begin to consistently impact their daily life, to the point that they struggle to fulfill their responsibilities and school and at home for weeks on end, then consider talking to a mental health professional and seeking a mental health diagnosis.
Addressing Common Questions
How to Choose the Right Treatment Option
It’s always a good idea to coordinate with mental health professionals when exploring teen mental health treatment options.
Rather than picking a single modality, the average mental health treatment approach is individualized and interdisciplinary, combining different approaches to address the many ways in which our mental well-being might reflect various factors in our lives, from diet and physical fitness to sociability and physical wellness.
A holistic approach to teen mental health combines therapy and medication with improvements to a teen’s sleep, exercise, and nutritional habits, as well as positive skill-building, to foster healthy and robust self-esteem and prosocial behavior.
Getting Involved in Your Teen’s Treatment
Families play a large role in the treatment of teen mental health problems and often factor into how these problems develop and perpetuate themselves as well.
Involving family in the treatment process can help leverage parental influence and familial dynamics to improve a teen’s mental health while giving families the opportunity to address how their relationships might be affected by individual mental health problems, including those experienced by other family members.
Teen Mental Health Treatment at Visions Treatment Center
Teen mental health issues can be treated through a holistic, individualized approach combining modalities from different disciplines to address the biological, social, and psychological factors affecting a teen’s well-being. Learning all about these different modalities and treatment options can be overwhelming. Start by looking for a treatment provider together.
Teens struggling with behavioral issues might benefit from psychiatric evaluation and outpatient care. In more severe cases, residential care helps teens focus on treatment while in a safe and secure environment. After initial treatment, teens and their families can continue to focus on recovery through group support and individual therapy.
