Adolescent Mental Health

If you're the parent of a "smart but scattered" teen, trying to help him or her grow into a self-sufficient, responsible adult may feel like a never-ending battle. Now you have an alternative to micromanaging, cajoling, or ineffective punishments. This positive guide provides a science-based program for promoting teens' independence by building their executive skills - the fundamental brain-based abilities needed to get organized, stay focused, and control impulses and emotions.

Between the ages of twelve and twenty-four, the brain changes in important and, at times, challenging ways. In Brainstorm, the renowned psychiatrist and bestselling author of Parenting from the Inside Out, The Whole-Brain Child, and Mindsight, Daniel Siegel busts a number of commonly held myths about adolescence — for example, that it is merely a stage of “immaturity” filled with often “crazy” behavior — to reveal how it is in fact a vital time in our lives in terms of charting the course for the adults we ultimately become.

For almost 30 years, Susan Burton hid her obsession with food and the secret life of compulsive eating and starving that dominated her adolescence. This is the relentlessly honest, fiercely intelligent story of living with both anorexia and binge-eating disorder, moving past her shame, and learning to tell her secret.

The SMART (Sensory Motor Arousal Regulation Treatment) program addresses three key processes that can be derailed by developmental trauma—somatic regulation, trauma processing, and attachment-building—and uses movement and sensation to target the neurological structures that support emotional and behavioral regulation.

Renowned neurologist Dr. Frances E. Jensen offers a revolutionary look at the brains of teenagers, dispelling myths and offering practical advice for teens, parents, and teachers. As a mother, teacher, researcher, clinician, and frequent lecturer to parents and teens, Dr. Jensen is in a unique position to explain to listeners the mystery and magic of the teen brain. In this audiobook, she brings to listeners the new, sometimes astonishing findings that are buried in academic journals.

The New York Times best-selling author of Untangled presents an urgently needed guide to the alarming increase in anxiety and stress experienced by girls from elementary school through college.

Counselors and psychotherapists are faced with ever-increasing complexity in their work with adolescents. In this book, Bronagh Starrs offers an understanding of developmental and therapeutic process from a relational-phenomenological Gestalt perspective. Starrs shows how the adolescent's presenting symptom issues are statements of compromised life space integrity and demonstrates therapeutic sensibility to the adolescent's first-person experience. Throughout the book, the clinician is offered extensive relational and creative strategies to support integrity repair for the adolescent.

Why America's sons are underachieving, and what we can do about it. Something is happening to boys today. From kindergarten to college, American boys are, on average, less resilient and less ambitious than they were a mere 20 years ago. The gender gap in college attendance and graduation rates has widened dramatically. In Boys Adrift, Dr. Leonard Sax delves into the scientific literature and draws on more than 20 years of clinical experience to explain why boys and young men are failing in school and disengaged at home.

She met far too many ADHD adolescents in Young Offender Institutes when she was a Prison Counsellor, and, without exception, none of them had had strong parental support. A lot of them had had no support whatsoever, and certainly nobody understanding their ADHD brain. So for mostly very silly, minor misdemeanours they had ended up behind bars. Sarah then went into private practice counselling ADHD teenagers, all of whom she bonded with instantly. For one very simple reason. She had the same brain as them - she ‘got’ them.

Why are certain people so incredibly great at what they do? Most of us think we know the answer - but we’re almost always wrong. That’s important, because if we’re wrong on this crucial question, then we have zero chance of getting significantly better at anything we care about. Happily, the real source of great performance is no longer a mystery. Bringing together extensive scientific research, best-selling author Geoff Colvin shows where we go wrong and what actually makes world-class performers so remarkable.

Written in Shipp's playfully authoritative, no-nonsense voice, The Grown-Up's Guide to Teenage Humans tells his story and unpacks practical strategies that can make a difference. Ultimately, it's not about shortcuts or magic words - as Shipp reminds us, it's about investing in kids and giving them the love, time, and support they need to thrive. And that means every kid is one caring adult away from being a success story.

Specially crafted with a warm, heartfelt, and friendly tone, this practical book explores the proven benefits of dialectal behavior therapy, along with how we can best equip today’s young people with the emotional tools they need to achieve balance, stability, and wellness in their lives. Drawing on a powerful mix of psychological insights, user-friendly advice, and fun worksheets to help you on your journey to a happier life, the DBT Workbook for Teens seeks to dispel the mysteries around DBT.

Michele Borba has been a teacher, educational consultant, and parent for 40 years - and she's never been more worried than she is about this current generation of kids. The high-achieving students she talks with every day are more accomplished, better educated, and more privileged than ever before. They're also more stressed, unhappier, and struggling with anxiety, depression, and burnout at younger and younger ages - "we're like pretty packages with nothing inside," said one young teen.

Your past holds power over your present. Childhood experiences shape your beliefs, actions, and relationships more than you realize. Do you struggle with self-doubt, insecurity, or uncontrollable emotions? These are echoes of unresolved childhood trauma, staining your adult life like unseen residue on a canvas. But there's hope. This book offers a compassionate approach to healing your inner child while equipping you with practical tools for emotional growth.

Borderline personality disorder, autism, narcissism, psychosis, Asperger's: All of these syndromes have one thing in common---lack of empathy. In some cases, this absence can be dangerous, but in others it can simply mean a different way of seeing the world. In The Science of Evil, Simon Baron-Cohen, an award-winning British researcher who has investigated psychology and autism for decades, develops a new brain-based theory of human cruelty.

This edition of Positive Discipline for Teenagers shows parents how to build stronger bridges of communication with their children, break the destructive cycles of guilt and blame that occur in parent-teen power struggles, and work toward greater mutual respect with their adolescents. At the core of the Positive Discipline approach is understanding that teens still need their parents, just in different ways—and by better understanding who their teens really are, parents can learn to encourage both their teens and themselves, and instill good judgment without being judgmental.

From renowned integrative family physician Dr. Kenneth Bock, a groundbreaking approach to understanding and treating mental health among adolescents and teens.

Parents will gain insight into how to transform their parenting to help middle schoolers find greater independence, connect well with peers, and have the deepest learning possible in and out of school. Educators will learn about the developmental keys to making middle school a place of belonging, with deep social and emotional learning and academics that draw out students' full motivation and potential.

Today’s college-bound kids are stressed, anxious, and navigating demands in their lives unimaginable to a previous generation. They’re performance machines, hitting the benchmarks they’re “supposed” to in order to reach the next tier of a relentless ladder. Then, their mental and physical exhaustion carries over right into first jobs. What have traditionally been considered the best years of life have become the beaten-down years of life.

Adolescence is the most dramatic and formative period of our lives: both thrilling and traumatic, it is when we become who we are, when the smallest things can have life-long effects. But it is also full of contradictions, making it bewildering to live through and usually misunderstood in retrospect. In this moving, empowering book, which is full of counter-intuitive insights, Lucy Foulkes, an expert in adolescent psychology, draws on the latest studies and in-depth interviews to demystify adolescent behaviours - friendship, bullying, risk-taking, sex, mental illness, love and much more.