Preventative Psychiatry for Teen Mental Health
Teen mental health is a primary concern in our society right now. The pandemic significantly disrupted the end of the 2019-2020 school year and the entire 2020-2021 school year. So far, the 2021-2022 school year – fingers crossed – appears to be a return to our regularly scheduled programming. Or, at very least, most high […]
How Stress Affects the Adolescent Brain
For centuries, our practice of medicine and understanding of disease was limited by one simple factor: we couldn’t look inside the human body. When pioneers began peering inside the human body, that always happened after a person was deceased – and that practice itself was considered heresy by the dominant powers of the time. Fast […]
Intimate Partner Abuse and Teen Dating Violence Risk Factors and Interventions
Expanding Our Understanding of Dating Abuse and Violence In an article called “INTIMATE PARTNER SEXUAL ABUSE: Who Are the Victims, What Are the Risks? Adults, Teens, and Children” published in the judicial periodical The Judge’s Journal last year, author Lynn Hecht Shafran addresses a serious problem in our society: sexual violence between people who are […]
Complex PTSD (CPTSD) in Teen Girls after Sexual Assault: Diagnosis and Treatment
Sexual Assault Can Affect Victims for Decades: What Type of Treatment Can Help? Sexual assault is a crime that affects millions of people in the U.S. The emotional and psychological consequences of sexual assault can cause severe, lifelong impairment. We’ll discuss these consequences and the details of the impairments below, but it’s important, first, for […]
Our Changing Understanding of the Course and Outcomes for Adolescent Borderline Personality Disorder
What are the latests findings related to adolescent borderline personality and what can a parent do to help their teen? New Insight on Trajectories for Adolescent Borderline Personality Disorder Adolescent borderline personality disorder (BPD) is one of the most challenging mental health disorders we know about. For decades, clinicians avoided diagnosing teens with BPD for […]
Finding the Top Adolescent Residential Treatment Centers
A Checklist for Parents Seeking Residential Treatment for Teens When your child crossed the threshold from pre-teen to full-fledged teenager, you probably braced yourself for the changes you knew were coming. You expected a range of physical, emotional, social, and psychological growth known as differentiation. The experts told you your teen would develop their own […]
Does Talking About Trauma Trigger Relapse?
Talking about traumatic events is often considered dangerous territory when treating addiction. Some people believe that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) – the gold standard in treating trauma – brings painful memories to the surface. They assert that CBT can be dangerous for people with dual diagnosis – i.e. those both a subtance use disorder (SUD) […]
When Does an Adolescent Need a Psychiatric Hospital vs. A Lower Level of Care?
How Can Parents Tell What Level of Care Their Teen Needs? Mental health disorders, like any other type of illness humans experience, come in all types. This is true across the lifespan: children, adolescents, adults, and seniors can all develop mental health disorders. Although the disorders share similar characteristics when they appear in the different […]
The Tipping Point: When Stress Pushes a Teen Toward an Anxiety Disorder
How to Recognize Anxiety and Reduce Stress in Anxious Teens Everyone knows about stress. Adults, teenagers, and children experience stress. Most of us understand that stress is an unavoidable part of life. Most of us also understand stress is not always negative. Stress can play a positive role in our lives. Stress leads to adaptation, […]
What is Indirect/Vicarious Trauma and How Does It Develop in Teens?
Hearing about a horrific tragedy that has occurred or is occurring can sometimes result in symptoms of trauma – even for people who weren’t directly involved in the event. This concept is known as indirect trauma. If this has happened to you, you know that traumatic symptoms can develop immediately after you hear the news, […]