Adolescent mental health concerns are more common than most people want to admit. As parents, we need to think that our children are normal, if not perfect. Although this is normally far from the fact even in the healthiest families, learning that you have a child with a harsh mental illness can be completely devastating for parents. 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.
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 lastly faced my worst fear. My son was not normal. He was a good child, but he needed professional psychiatric care. If my son 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.
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. You need the best psychiatrist for your adolescent – someone who can be a mentor and role model as well as an excellent doctor. Acute care was alright – there was a hospital that would take him in almost instantly – 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. It has to be a decision you take together too. You have to to poise your observations and the opinions of your teenager to find somebody who they can actually work with.
It turns out that I was right. The psychiatrist that I found was an specialist in treating adolescent mental health disorders. He treated teenagers with bipolar disorder, acute anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, and lots of 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 physician 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 trial began, and I was optimistic that more constructive developments would follow.
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