Parents can encourage teen mental health awareness during Mental Health Awareness Month by fostering open communication, destigmatizing the topic of mental well-being, and providing resources for support at home and at school. Additionally, parents can model self-care practices and prioritize their own mental well-being to set a positive example for their teens.
Parents play a crucial role in promoting teen mental health awareness. Teens look to their parents for guidance, even in their rebellious years.
Parents can help teens take a healthier approach to their thoughts and actions in adulthood by fostering open communication, providing support, and modeling a better approach to their mental well-being. Mental Health Awareness Month is a great time to connect with your teens about mental health, provide open communication, and explore the benefits of teen mental health treatment if necessary.
This guide provides parents with information about the importance of teen mental health awareness.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month
This Mental Health Awareness Month, we encourage parents and caregivers to reflect on their coping styles and subconscious strategies for recognizing and engaging with signs of mental unease or discomfort.
Periods of depression or anxiety are common in adulthood. Being equipped with the tools to address these feelings and the thoughts they can cause is important, especially for young people.
Parents can model a healthy approach to sadness or frustration for their children, and in families with a history of mental health problems such as OCD, experienced parents can help teens navigate through some of the onset symptoms and seek professional help together, implementing coping skills such as those learned through exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy.
The Parent’s Guide to Teen Mental Health Awareness
Navigating the complexities of teen mental health can be very difficult. There are countless mental health issues to remember, disorders and syndromes, signs and symptoms, classifications, and prognoses. But playing the role of a parent to a teen concerning their mental health is much more about encouraging self-sufficiency, strong self-esteem, and independence than a textbook understanding of depression and anxiety.
Our comprehensive guide offers practical advice, resources, and strategies to promote teen mental health awareness, foster open communication, and support your teen’s emotional well-being.
Here’s the Parent’s Guide to Teen Mental Health Awareness.
Common Mental Health Issues in Teens
The most common adolescent mental health disorders include mood disorders (such as depression and bipolar disorder), anxiety disorders (such as social anxiety, generalized anxiety, or panic disorder), personality disorders (such as borderline personality disorder), and trauma-related mental health disorders.
Teens with a mental health disorder are also more likely to struggle with a co-occurring substance use disorder, sometimes known as a dual diagnosis. Other mental disorders in teens include ADHD, OCD, and schizophrenia. Age of onset is important – conditions like ADHD are usually apparent in early childhood, while schizophrenia usually begins to develop in late adolescence and early adulthood. It is rarer in teens.
Causes of Mental Health Challenges
Mental health issues have been a fact of life for all of human history, but our understanding of human psychiatry and mental health as a focal point for treatment has radically changed over time.
Since diagnosing and tracking statistics for conditions like depression and anxiety, we’ve found that teens today are more anxious and depressed than previous generations. While our screening tools have improved, researchers also believe that we simply live in more stressful times.
Teens today may be experiencing greater rates of stress due to academic pressures, real-world events, growing wealth inequality, rising cost of living, technological developments such as social media, and increasingly polarizing discussions around politics and the future.
How to Talk About Mental Health
Destigmatizing the topic of mental health should be an important goal this month. Teens should learn to feel encouraged and empowered to discuss their fears, feelings, and worries with their loved ones.
Sharing problems can help teens feel heard while helping them avoid hiding their darker emotions or thoughts, which can often be important warning signs for parents to talk to their teens about therapy.
Supporting Your Teen’s Mental Health
Young boys especially feel pressured to internalize their negative emotions and utilize them to fuel aggressive or competitive behaviors. However, this is a poor form of coping, as it tends to help boys ignore underlying mental health problems and instead use them to fuel aggressive and often antisocial behavior.
Support your teens by emphasizing communication over internalizing and finding ways for the family to blow off steam together, such as sports, weekend trips outdoors, or parent-child projects at home, whether building a patio or helping your teen redecorate their room.
When to Seek Professional Help
Encouraging your teen to communicate their emotions, giving them plenty of space and opportunities to vent in healthy ways, and modeling healthy ways to deal with negative emotions as a parent can help them grow up to become well-adjusted and mentally resilient adults.
But there are still mental health conditions that require professional treatment, even with the best support possible. When your teen’s thoughts or behaviors become unmanageable or threaten to cause harm to themselves or others – directly or indirectly – then it becomes crucial to get help.
Related: 10 Benefits of Residential Treatment for Teens
Resources and Treatment Options
Navigating the world of treatment options and resources can be daunting for teens. As a concerned parent, you will have many questions about treatment options, from the cost of residential treatment and insurance to managing therapy and school simultaneously.
Parents can talk to teens and therapists and help mediate an arrangement where their teen gets the needed treatment.
Related: 10 Benefits of Talk Therapy for Teens
Teen Mental Health Treatment
Are you concerned about your teen’s mental health? You’re not alone.
At Visions Treatment Centers in California, we offer comprehensive and compassionate treatment programs tailored specifically for adolescents.
Our experienced team provides personalized care to help teens overcome mental health challenges and thrive. Contact us today to learn more about our effective treatment options for teen mental health.
Conclusion
Parents play the most important role in fostering teen mental health awareness. They can do so through open communication, destigmatization, role modeling, and by being pillars of support for teens in active treatment. If your loved one has been struggling with a mental health problem recently, then we at Visions Treatment Centers are here to help.
