Bill: Good afternoon everyone and thank you for your interest in my topic, Mental Health of Adolescents. I hope you find this informative and useful in your everyday practice. I would like to stress that the concepts and the various content areas that we will talk about today could really be useful to adolescents in just about any setting.
Introduction
Let's start out by looking at some stereotypes. When someone asks you, what is a teenager like? There are some typical things that come to mind; moody, uninterested in things, raging hormones, and lots of angst and drama. Conversely, we hear adults say to adolescents, "These are the best years of your life." If you are not having a particularly good adolescence, you are not going to appreciate that comment. These stereotypes persist and have some truth to them, but they provide two kind of interesting problems. One problem is that the stereotype regarding, for example moodiness and irritability, could cloud diagnosing a disorder such as bipolar disorder which might be emerging. It can be difficult to look at adolescents as individuals. We have to come to the table thinking that adolescents will each have different problems and issues, backgrounds, and experiences.
Etiology
Risk Factors
As with other age groups, there are a number of factors that could be involved in developing mental health issues. In practice today mental health issues are believed to be a combination of genetic and psychosocial factors.
We also have to look at equality of life issues, and by this I mean the socioeconomic status of the adolescent and his family. Do they have the means to access healthcare? What kind of neighborhood do they live in? What is the makeup of the neighborhood? Is it a typical suburban neighborhood that is fairly safe? Is it easy to engage in lots of after school activities and play basketball in your driveway, or is it an urban intercity neighborhood where it is not very safe? Is there gang violence? It really depends on a lot of different things like that. The other thing with the equality of life issues is education level of the family. For example, well-educated parents or parents that had good role modeling in the first place will probably take their children for well-baby visits and to the pediatrician whenever they see a problem. They are also more likely to take a child or an adolescent in for assessment if they are noticing problems. Conversly if you did not have issues in your family history and your parents had poor parenting skills, you might not have such great parenting skills and overlook a lot of things that other people might find alarming. What causes one adolescent to develop mental health problems may not affect another. If you are an adolescent who has a good support system, lots of friends, have been well taken care of, well-parented, does well in school, and your friend gets gets killed in a car accident, while you may be sad and go through all different stages of grief and mourning, you will probably rebound more easily than another child who grew up in a family where there were not those kind of resources. This can happen across all socioeconomic statuses when the child's problems were minimized or the adults were not tuned in. A person may develop a mental illness because there is a background of mental health problems in their family, or by not gettting treatment early enough. It can be a combination of factors. Generally, we are all genetically hardwired for a variety of illnesses, mental health as well as physical health illnesses, but how we react to them is largely due sometimes to what our home environment is, what our social supports are, and what our accesses to healthcare are.
Adolescents from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds can face different role expectations. Each adolescent is really an individual. You may come from an ethnic or cultural group that it is important for the male to get a job and help support the family, or for male or female to stay home after school and help out and take the children to allow a family to work. Families might also have different traditions depending upon their cultural backgrounds. We need to look at a lot of different client factors when we are looking at an adolescent.
Their self efficacy, whether they feel that they have control over their environment or not, is also important. Are they exposed to bullying and school violence?
All these things are very contributory to mental health issues developing in adolescents. This all sounded kind of sad. There is a downside to adolescence, but there is also an upside.
