Teen Mental Health

Teen mental health problems are more common than most people want to admit. As parents, we want to think that our children are normal, if not perfect. Although this is generally far from the truth even in the most healthy families, learning that you have a child with a severe mental illness can be completely devastating for parents. When my Johnny started having Teen 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 finally faced my worst fear. My son was not normal. He was a good child, but he needed professional psychiatric care.

Of course, finding a good doctor for him was extremely difficult. In many communities, there is a severe shortage of decent Teen mental health care. Acute care was alright – there was a hospital that would take him in almost immediately – but finding the sort of long-term care that I really felt he needed was more difficult. Teen 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. You want the best psychiatrist for your Teen – someone who can be a mentor and role model as well as an excellent doctor. It has to be a decision you take together too. You need to balance your observations and the opinions of your teenager to find someone who they can really work with.

The psychiatrist that I found was an expert in treating Teen mental health disorders. He treated teenagers with bipolar disorder, acute anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, and many 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 doctor 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 ordeal began, and I was optimistic that more positive developments would follow.

It turns out that I was right. Basically, Teen mental health disorders come in two flavors. There are the disorders that are simply the product of Teens – anxiety, depression, and that sort of thing – and those which become active during adolescence and then don’t go away. If my son had had schizophrenia or some other chronic disease, the prognosis would have been quite a bit bleaker. As an Teen with chronic anxiety and depression problems, however, he wasn’t destined to face lifelong troubles in the same way.

There are a lot of people out there that really want to understand alcoholism and drug addiction. So the questions – ‘what is alcoholism or what is drug addiction?’ are very common.

So if you are one of those people, hopefully I can help. Now you need to understand that alcoholism and drug addiction can be quite complex to get a handle on.

The kind of things you would need to know to understand them in depth, would include things like whether drug addiction and alcoholism is a disease, the causes of alcoholism and addiction, and the genetic/hereditary impact on addiction and alcoholism.

But lets take it a step further back first and go deeper than that – so that we really get to the heart of the problem.

Whether you have a genetic predisposition towards alcoholism or drug addiction making you more susceptible – or whether life has just given you a few bad breaks so you use drugs or alcohol to help you cope, which has led you to addiction – there is an underlying reason that explains it all.

And I think it’s ultimately an emptiness and lack of wholeness that you feel, which you cover up or try to hide/suppress by using drugs and alcohol. I know – I’ve been there. You feel disconnected to life and question your purpose, which is something I used to do all the time. Still do actually, but it’s not nearly as bad.

According to Dr. Andrew Weil, who has a brilliant explanation for it in his book, Natural Health, Natural Medicine; addiction is not psychological or pharmacological problem and can’t be solved using these methods. He says it is at root, a Spiritual Concern, due to the fact that it represents a misdirected attempt at experiencing wholeness, satisfaction and inner completeness.

So in trying to understand, what is drug addiction and what is alcoholism actually? Remember that they are in essence a Spiritual ‘problem.’ And by doing that, you will be far more effective in treating and recovering from them successfully.