For teenagers, a solid group of friends can enrich life and make the ups and downs of adolescence a fun, shared experience. Friends can help teens manage school, romance, family troubles, sports, and everything else that goes along with being a teen. But not all teens make friends easily, and sometimes life events interrupt friendships and force teens to start all over. Perhaps that’s the case with your adolescent child.
If you have depressive thoughts, you might sometimes wonder if you have depression – as in clinical depression. A voice inside your head may say things like: “Is this really depression? Maybe it’s just a phase? Or maybe I’m just overanalyzing my feelings? If I was actually depressed, shouldn’t I be… XYZ?” What makes it worse is when other people’s opinions cause you to doubt yourself. Relatives or friends may
If you worry your teen is getting off track this fall, you’re not alone. Parents across the country understand that the stress and disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic can have a wide range of negative consequences for their teens. Shelter-in-place orders, social distancing guidelines, and virtual school all mean things teens previously took for granted no longer happen the way they did. If they’re happening at all. Depending on
For over 20 years – since 1999 – the Substance Abuse and Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) organized and promoted National Recovery Month (Recovery Month) every September. The goal of Recovery Month is to spread awareness, reduce stigma, and educate individuals and families about the importance of mental health and substance use treatment and services. This goal has four core elements: Behavioral Health Awareness. Mental and behavioral health are an essential
We recently published an article about the relationship between teen mental health, coronavirus, and high school sports. That piece was based on a study initiated by a Canadian high school student who analyzed the effect of coronavirus lockdown on student athletes in her school district in Ontario. She found that after six weeks of shelter-in-place orders, over half the students surveyed reported feeling isolated and disconnected, almost half experienced elevated
Events in the year 2020 changed life in the U.S. in countless ways. One change many of us experience directly is the shift to virtual work and school. Those aren’t the only things that shifted, though. Social contact, live music, and in-person events – from awards shows to graduations to conventions – now frequently occur on virtual platforms. But that list is incomplete. We also now use virtual medicine –
The Santa Monica Unified School District (SMUSD) will resume classes via distance-learning this year. For Ms. Orah Gidanian, a special-education instructor at the Santa Monica Alternative School House (SMASH), this makes sense. “While I am definitely nervous thinking about how this will impact our students’ academic futures and their families, I didn’t see how we could open up safely. I glanced at all the regulations that would be required to
The Los Angeles County Unified School District is the largest school district in Los Angeles County. It represents about 42 percent of the public-school students in Los Angeles County. If you’ve ever been curious about rates of mental health and substance use disorder in LA County, there’s a yearly report that has your answer: The LAUSD California Healthy Kids Survey (CHKS) Every year, the California Department of Education Coordinated School
The coronavirus pandemic touches almost every facet of life for people in the U.S. The way we work, the way we play, the way we socialize – it’s nearly impossible to find an area of day-to-day living that coronavirus does not affect. At the start of the pandemic, most of us thought we were at the beginning of a temporary, passing phase. We’d shelter-in-place, social distance, wear masks, and stick
Santa Clara County has received attention in recent years from media and mental health professionals concerned about the alarming rates of mental health issues among youth. For example, in Palo Alto, specifically, there were an unusual amount of teen suicide clusters over the past decade. Between two Palo Alto high schools, the suicide rate is four or five times the national average. And Palo Alto is only one of the
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