Dr. Henry Paul, MD

Psychiatrist, Author and Educator

Tag Archives: teenage mental health

A CHECKLIST TO FOR PARENTS TO HELP THEIR TEENS GRIEVE

December 16th, 2014

Teenager’s experiences and expressions of grief vary greatly. Some teenagers

will experience shock and denial, even disbelieving that the death has occurred. Others might show very few signs of grieving. Keep the following points in mind as you help your teen deal with grief:

  • Respect the form and time that your teen takes to grieve.
  • Assist your teen in expressing thoughts openly, on the teen’s terms, not yours. Encourage your teen to share feelings, even if they are scary, unusual, and frightening.
  • Help your teen by gathering articles, old pictures, and old stories about the dead person. Some people even suggest making a collage as a way of helping the healing process.
  • Be as present and available as you can to your teen. Many teenagers feel neglected when people, especially parents, and close family members aren’t physically and emotionally there for them. (The neglect sometimes happens because the teen’s grief may make others feel anxiety about death and thus may give in to the desire to avoid the teenager).
  • Look for signs of hyper-sexuality, drug abuse, risky behavior, depression, and suicidal thoughts or plans which are pathological expressions of grief.
  • Involvement in a grief support group can be very important for a teenager and surviving relatives. Support can be in groups devoted to dealing with grieving – groups that may involve only peers or the whole family. The sense of belonging to a group provides a safe place to talk about feelings and lessens the sense of isolation and sadness that are normal parts of the grieving process.
  • Listen to your teen. Be supportive and don’t immediately try to fix it. Work together through your grief.
  • Don’t be afraid to ask for help from other family members, mental health professionals or friends. Be sure to contact a mental health professional if you feel there is a deep depression or suicidal thoughts or plans.
  • Lastly, be sure that your attitudes about death are as healthy as possible to set a good example for your teenager. As always, we affect teens more by what we do and how we act than by what we say.

DISCLAIMER
Information contained in this blog is intended for educational purposes only. It is not intended as medical or psychiatric advice for individual conditions or treatment and does not substitute for a medical or psychiatric examination. A psychiatrist must make a determination about any treatment or prescription. Dr. Paul does not assume any responsibility or risk for the use of any information contained within this blog.

UNDERSTANDING TEEN GRIEF

December 15th, 2014

So, in my last blog I touched on bereavement counseling in general. Now I want to talk about bereavement specifically with teenagers.

Adolescent grief or bereavement is normal and natural. Grief is not an illness; it is a normal reaction to loss. Teenagers need to ask questions. Give them prompt and correct information. Allow them to express every concern and to participate in all rituals having to do with the death and the grieving process. Allow them to be comforted by those who are still alive.

Do not keep your teenager from going to funerals; encourage and support them to do so. Unlike very young children, teenagers can be given details about how a loved one died. Grieving involves many complicated feelings, such as anger, guilt, shame, conflict, and even rage. Teenagers may sometimes feel that they want to join the dead loved one. Sometimes they may even feel that they see or hear the image or voice of the dead person (read my “Dreams of the Departed” blog from November). You should encourage discussion about this. Of course, if the wish to be with the loved one is accompanied by actual suicidal plans or behaviors, or the wish to be dead, you need to seek immediate professional help.

Emphasizing the positive relationship that your teen had with the dead person – going through old pictures, telling old stories, and answering all questions about the deceased – will go a long way.

Parental honesty, availability and support are the key to helping the teenager work through grief. Harm is done not from honest confrontation and discussion of death but rather from misguidedly trying to protect the teenager through avoidance, hypocrisy, duplicity, and misinformation. Not only should family members be honest and open, but they should tend to their grief, as well. Shared grief ultimately becomes less of a burden to all.

Whatever the means of achieving it – the real goal is to keep communication open at all times!

DISCLAIMER
Information contained in this blog is intended for educational purposes only. It is not intended as medical or psychiatric advice for individual conditions or treatment and does not substitute for a medical or psychiatric examination. A psychiatrist must make a determination about any treatment or prescription. Dr. Paul does not assume any responsibility or risk for the use of any information contained within this blog.

 

CHILDREN WITH MENTAL ILLNESS AND THE PARENTS WHO LOVE THEM

October 7th, 2014

Every Mom’s Worst Nightmare; Coping with a Child’s Mental Illness was a great segment recently on CBS News. I highly recommend you take a few minutes and watch it.

Do children really suffer from mental disorders? Isn’t that only the domain of adults? Unfortunately, no. It might be helpful to consider the numbers. There are approximately 75 million children and teenagers in the country. About one-in-five young people less than eighteen-years-old are thought to suffer from a bona-fide mental disorder. That is at least 15 million of our youth. In that number, approximately half suffer from a serious mental disturbance, and about half of those suffer from what is called an extreme disturbance.

In the CBS segment, Mom Liza Long tells how she felt on the day of the Sandy Hook shooting.

“I just put my head down on my desk and started to cry,” Long, 42, told CBS News. But it wasn’t that Long knew any of the families that had lost a child. “I had children about that age too. It’s every mom’s worst nightmare. But I realized right away it’s every mom’s worst nightmare on two fronts, not just one.”

Her first thought, she later wrote, was “What if my son does that someday?”

Only a day before Sandy Hook, Long had to forcibly restrain her second oldest son, Michael — then 13 — to prevent him from running out into oncoming traffic, and then had him transported to an acute care psychiatric hospital.

Realizing that your child has a problem is scary. It can be devastating to learn that your child is physically sick, but discovering that your child suffers from a mental disorder adds another layer of confusion and anxiety. Mental disorders are not as well understood as physical disorders, and it is only recently that they have begun to be talked about openly. The school shootings have really focused the microscope on mental health as the root of the problem, not just the accessibility of guns.

Long’s story opens a new dialogue for parents of children with severe mental disorders. Raising a child with these issues is complicated, scary and often-time daunting for parents, caregivers and the medical professionals who are trying to help.

In the CBS interview, Long tells about the night of the Sandy Hook shooting when she returned home and wrote her blog entry, “Thinking the Unthinkable” on her blog, “The Anarchist Soccer Mom.”  It was her call to action.

(From the CBS interview):

“I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother. I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother. I am James Holmes’s mother. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho’s mother. And these boys–and their mothers–need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness,” said Long.

Long had been telling her story anonymously for years, but this time she made the decision to put her name to the story. “I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me,” she wrote. The blog post went viral, generating more than a million ‘likes’ on Facebook and 30,000 email replies.

I applaud Long for speaking out about her child and her struggles to parent a child with such a mental disorder. We need to be having more dialogues about how to address these mental disorders so we can come up with a better support system for the families and better treatment for the children. We need to be able to diagnose better, offer more support, and make it less bureaucratic for the system to work for those families in need.

You can follow Long on her blog the Anarchist Soccer Mom.

DISCLAIMER
Information contained in this blog is intended for educational purposes only. It is not intended as medical or psychiatric advice for individual conditions or treatment and does not substitute for a medical or psychiatric examination. A psychiatrist must make a determination about any treatment or prescription. Dr. Paul does not assume any responsibility or risk for the use of any information contained within this blog.