Treating and Preventing
Adolescent Mental Health Disorders:
What We Know and What We Don’t Know
A Research Agenda for Improving the Mental Health of Our Youth

and

If Your Adolescent has…

Oxford University Press

In my private practice I focus on the themes of Grow With the Flow – issues of learning and cognition: helping people learn, think, plan, organize, and problem solve. If that sounds like I don’t need to be concerned with emotions, forget it – all learning is intimately tied to emotions, and when learning fails, emotions are more likely to be at the base than cognitive factors.

Students who are dealing with a mental health disorder are unlikely to focus effectively on studies, no matter how hard they try. It’s critical to deal with those emotional issues, and not to be sidetracked by the obvious learning issue. A junior high student is failing all her classes because she’s too depressed to do school. To push her to get her grades back up will be to miss the point. This is the more true because there’s a double whammy involved: Not only does her depression block learning directly, but the consequences of failing to perform to expectations is very likely to cycle back into the emotions and start a feedback loop – a nosedive.

The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, recognizing that adolescent mental health disorders have become a major public health issue, has launched The Adolescent Mental Health Initiative to find out what we know and what we need to know in order to diagnose and treat adolescents who suffer major mental-health disorders, and to help bring them to successful adult lives.

One product of the initiative is a series of parent resource guides to specific disorders, backed by a weighty handbook for professionals. (Yes! I had to know. It weighs in at 1.954 kg.) The parent resources are distilled from the reference work, which in turn was developed with the assistance of over 100 well-respected psychologists and psychiatrists.

The reference work for mental health professionals, Treating and Preventing Adolescent Mental Health Disorders: What We Know and What We Don’t Know carries the additional subtitle “A Research Agenda for Improving the Mental Health of Our Youth.”

I’m going to tackle the big book, which looks like a benchmark resource for mental health professionals. But I’m not sure I should post about it here, on a site that’s mostly about learning. Please let me know what you think: Should I post on mental health as it relates to learning, or is that too far from the focus of Grow With the Flow?

The project also has a web site for teens, copecaredeal.