A psychiatrist prescribes medication to help with your psychological struggles. There are some certified to work with teens and children.
First of all, a lot of people do not know the difference between a psychologist, psychiatrist, counselor and therapist. Let me start by clarifying what those terms mean. Counselor is the most general term. It can refer to a therapist, psychologist or psychiatrist. Counselor is also the term used for a person with an associate degree or certification in addiction counseling. A therapist refers to either a psychologist or a master’s level person with a license. A therapist is someone who will spend an hour with you on a regular basis talking about ways to work through your struggles, and can also do psychological testing. A psychologist has a doctorate (either a Ph.D. or a Psy.D.), can do psychological testing, and can do therapy. A psychiatrist is a medical doctor, who completed medical school and a residency. The psychiatrist can do therapy, but typically chooses to refer out for therapy. The psychiatrist evaluates patients to determine whether medicine can help a psychological condition, and if so, prescribes that medication.
Sometimes people hesitate to take medicine for a psychological condition, preferring to address the problem in therapy. Usually your therapist will let you know when it is time to seek a psychiatric evaluation. It is also a good idea to see a psychiatrist if you feel extremely depressed, are considering suicide, have been hallucinating, or have extreme anxiety like panic attacks. There are other conditions where seeing a psychiatrist is advisable as well. For example, if you suspect your child has ADHD, then you can get a diagnosis and treatment from a psychiatrist. Use your therapist or primary care doctor as a guide in terms of when to contact a psychiatrist, and often they will have good referrals to give you.
When you go to your psychiatry appointment, come prepared. Keep a list of your symptoms, what caused them, and what time of day they occurred. Be extremely honest about any drugs or alcohol you use. Your psychiatrist is required to keep everything confidential, so don’t be afraid to tell him or her. If you smoke marijuana every so often, your psychiatrist NEEDS to know this. The reason it is so important to give your psychiatrist this information is that you are being given medication. Alcohol and illegal drugs interact with legal medication, affecting how well the medicine works. In some cases you actually are putting yourself in danger by mixing certain medications with certain drugs or with alcohol. Your psychiatrist isn’t going to be judgmental of you, believe me. Your psychiatrist has heard it all, and I mean ALL. You will not shock your psychiatrist. He or she has seen some of the seemingly most normal looking people take drugs, have an alcohol problem, lose touch with reality, make poor decisions, participate in extremely risky behavior, and anything else you can think of. Just keep in mind that your psychiatrist can only help you to the extent that you share everything about what is going on with you.
Also come to your appointments with a list of any physical symptoms you might be dealing with. Remember, this is a medical doctor. Sometimes psychological problems are caused by a physical problem or a disease. Your psychiatrist is trained to look for signs of physical disease and help you connect the dots. They are also trained to look for the opposite (physical problems caused by psychological impairment).
So, is it time to call a psychiatrist? Perhaps, and especially if you’re considering taking medication to deal with a psychological struggle. Consult with your therapist or primary care doctor to find out. If you don’t have a therapist or primary care doctor, you can call a psychiatrist directly for an evaluation in most cases.
Helping teens grow and families improve connection,
Adolescent females have been shown to benefit from being athletes for a number of reasons. Some of my favorites include the development of fortitude, and work ethic. I also love the stat showing teen female athletes become sexually active later than their non-athletic peers.
There’s a fine line between accepting who you are, and taking that too far. If we’re really honest with ourselves we all will admit we use the excuse, “That’s just the way I am,” when we don’t want to face something ugly about ourselves.
Help your teen combat depression by volunteering together. Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
One of the simplest things you can do to help your teen combat mild depression is to help them be more selfless. These days the commonly held belief is that we all need to work on ourselves; we need to take time out for ourselves; we need to focus on our own internal growth. If we would spend extra effort improving then we’d find happiness. Since happiness is the opposite of depressed, everything would get better, right?
If this is such sage advice, why hasn’t it worked yet? Why are people feeling lonely, purposeless, aimless, and easily overwhelmed?
The answer can be found by looking down and looking up. If you look at ants you will notice they are almost always working in teams. They are following one another in a line, and they live in a colony. Ants even carry their dead back to the nest. If you look all the way up the the heavens, you see that even God himself does not work alone. He has Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
Nothing about the way the world works indicates that we are meant to fix ourselves. Part of the reason I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE working with teens is that they are still living in a family. While the family may come broken, piecemeal or otherwise, there are always people around the teens. The healing in my clients has come from adjustments made to their relationships far more often than adjustments to their inner selves. Even when they adjust their inner selves, they don’t seem to feel content until their relationships begin to change.
I see a great number of girls who come because they are struggling with body image. They are trying to reach perfection on the outside. A perfect body is a lonely, isolated pursuit. Even if these girls achieve their desired appearance, they are unhappy and unfulfilled. Again, we were created to be in relationship with others.
Now that you know the background, you can likely see how this will relate to your child’s depression. Stop encouraging your depressed teenager to work on him or herself. Instead, push your teenager to work on someone else or something else. Take them down to the soup kitchen on Saturday. Have them volunteer at the YMCA to play with kids after school. Take them to the library and have them volunteer in the Friends of the Library bookstore. Sign them up for the Big Brother/Big Sister program (as the big brother or sister).
The antidote to mild depression is to get into relationship and give of yourself (Please note, for more severe clinical depression the most important thing to do is seek professional help. Clinical depression is not resolved with a simple change of attitude or change of scene. It is dangerous and requires intervention).
So, when you see your teenager tonight, tell them you know how to help them perk up. Don’t make this optional. Get them involved in helping someone else and watch them begin to find a sense of joy. If you work alongside them, you’ll get to experience that joy and you’ll strengthen your relationship with your teenager!
Helping teens grow and families improve connection,
Adolescents spend a lot of time filling their mind with things that don’t necessarily edify them as a person. Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net.
Without meaning to, we’ve let our kids fill their minds with intellectual junk food. We are taught to be very careful about what we eat so that we can keep our physical bodies healthy. In our culture though, we don’t pay a lot of attention to feeding our minds with things that keep the mind healthy. Other than schoolwork, and maybe the occasional church service or bible study, our teenagers fill their minds with social media, TV and whatever they happen to search on the internet.
Adolescents are at a stage where they are heavily influenced by what they read, hear and see. As parents, it’s our responsibility to strongly encourage our teens in learning things that will truly help them in life. This ranges from what they watch on TV to what they read online. I realize that you can’t control everything entering your teenager’s mind. However, you can prohibit them from watching TV shows with nudity, sexual content, cursing, drugs, etc.- whatever goes against how you’d like them to act. Because these things are so incredibly commonplace, even on “family friendly” shows, we have become numb to them. I was watching sports last night and a Victoria’s Secret commercial came on. At some point in our culture’s not too distant past that would have been seen as pornography (a bunch of girls in bras and panties making seductive faces and poses); it would never have been allowed during a sports game that kids are probably watching with their parents. Now though, that’s commonplace. You have to think really carefully about whether you’re okay with your teenage son or daughter seeing this kind of thing.
Okay, so the logical question that follows my soapbox rant is, ‘What should I have my teen viewing/hearing?’ The answer to that question lies within the bounds of your values. In our house we follow the Christian faith, so our kids spend at least some of their internet time using apps that help them understand their faith better. In my cousin’s house, music, education and culture were highly valued so my aunt had my cousin watching movies that broadened his horizons on different cultures. These weren’t boring documentaries, just movies made in other countries that showed another view of life in the storytelling. This was intentional on the part of my aunt, and it paid off as my cousin became an adult.
There also needs to be a limit to social media. It’s up to you how you handle this. Maybe you limit the amount of time your son or daughter spends on it. Maybe you strongly encourage your son or daughter to follow their role models and interact with those people as often as their friends. That is one of the great things about social media- it’s actually possible to interact with people you could never otherwise reach.
The last thing that’s really important is for you to assess how you spend your spare time. Are you watching trashy TV? Are you always posting pictures for your friends on Facebook at the expense of reading a good book? If you look at yourself and realize you are not feeding your mind healthy intellectual food, make a few changes. This is actually really hard at first, but the example you set pays huge dividends with your kids.
Helping teens grow and families improve connection,
Hello, I’m Lauren! If you notice your teen struggling, you might be feeling helpless, hopeless, frustrated or concerned as a parent. Try to remember, there is hope. I want to help your adolescent feel better. My hope is for them to enjoy their life again. I want them to feel confident they can handle whatever situations arise.
