Teenagers & Mental Health
Exploring Options Available When a Teen is Struggling (Including Leading By Example)
Did you know that the average age of first onset for most mental health disorders is during junior high school? You start becoming more aware of how the world works, people expect you to behave more despite your brain not being fully developed yet, you have more responsibility without many more freedoms, your hormones are kicking into overdrive, we feel the need to figure out who we are, learning new things at school starts getting hard, you first start dealing with the drama of friend group cliques, and then we experience the heartbreaks of having our first romantic relationships. Entering adolescence is rough!
I spent years providing school-based therapy over at Rhodes Junior High School, over on Baseline and Longmore, so I have a lot of experience helping young teens with these kinds of problems. I really enjoyed with people at this age because they were old enough to understand what it was that they were feeling, and they were usually still hopeful that things could change.
If you are an adult with your own mental health problems, could you imagine what your life would be like now if you had gotten a therapist back at age 13? A lot of people I have asked this question to feel tearful thinking about how many traumas they could have avoided if they learned healthy boundaries and had enough self-esteem to value themselves. They also realize how many poor decisions they wouldn’t have made if they stopped feeling like they needed to prove that they were good enough, or if they dealt with traumas they were exposed to as a child in a healthy way through therapy.
Those reflections from adult I have seen are why I sincerely encourage anyone who cares about a teenager struggling with their mental health to connect them with a therapist. Teenagers sometimes will deny that they need help because they don’t want to feel like a burden; they know their parents are stressed with money or running around with too much to take care of, and so they deny themselves help in order to reduce stress in their parents. Teens may also feel like suggesting therapy means that there is something wrong with them, and so the small part of themselves standing up for their own sense of self-esteem will reject that strongly, and so this is why normalizing the experience is so important. I suggest normalizing it by actively taking care of yourself, sharing how valuable it is, and reframing it as one of the most courageous things a person can do.
If you are a parent to a teen who is struggling, but they are adamant that they don’t want therapy, do not force it. Being forced into therapy often isn’t helpful, because it creates a negative association with therapy, often associating it with feeling a lack of control. When that happens, they will avoid therapy when they need it later in life as an adult.
Instead of forcing a teen into therapy they don’t want, seek therapy for yourself. Often parenting advice online is great, but we struggling with implementing it. Usually, our hardest moments in parenting are due to us reacting rather than being intentional in our responses. We are reacting because parenting is inherently triggering and brings up all of those unresolved feelings from childhood. I have seen it over and over again with parents I help: when you address your own underlying feelings, parenting becomes so much easier.
The other option is trying out family therapy. Even if the problem didn’t start due to a dysfunctional relationship within the family, it usually creates one. Kids will care about disappointing their parents when their relationship is close. Kids will talk to their parents when they are faced with difficult choices when they can trust that their parents won’t freak out or take over and tell them what to do. Kids will take in their parents’ advice when they feel understood and respected by their parents. Family therapy aims to help build up those exact feelings.
Whether it is therapy for a teen you love, therapy for yourself, or family therapy for your parent-child relationship, it is worth the investment. Many problems get worse as time goes on, and the longer it goes on, it creates more resentment, lowers self-esteem, reduces hope that things can change, and further damages relationships. It is an investment of time and money, but if you ever want the problem to go away, the time and money you will spend to fix it costs more and more the longer you let it linger. Plus, time is short. Kids grow up so quickly, and actually enjoying these years of your life together is something you can’t ever get back. Please, prioritize healing as soon as you can. I never hear people regretting healing too early, they instead end up regretting all of the years wasted in pain unnecessarily. Your family is worth it. Your child is worth it. YOU are worth it.
