Mental health is not “all in your head.” It’s intertwined with physical health. And in 2021, nearly 1 in 3 students experienced poor mental health. So in this big, complicated world where everything’s stressful all the time, how can we be supportive adults? And what other kinds of help are out there?
On this episode of Mayo Clinic Kids, we talk with John MacPhee and Dr. Laura Erickson-Schroth from The Jed Foundation about how to get your teen the help they need, when they need it.
Find us online at Mayo Clinic Press for more health and wellness articles, podcasts and books. Do you have feedback, questions or topic suggestions? Email us at mcppodcasts@mayo.edu.
Read the transcript:
Read the transcript:
Dr. Angela Mattke:
Hi there, this is Dr. Mattke with a quick content warning before we jump into this episode. We’re talking about teen mental health—which includes topics like suicide. If this is a sensitive topic for you or anyone else listening, please take care.
I’m Dr. Angela Mattke, a pediatrician with Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and I specialize in helping parents make sense of medical issues. On each episode of “Kids Health Matters,” we talk to different medical experts to get the latest pediatric research and recommendations.
This episode is about teen mental health. They say it takes a village to raise a child. That can also be a way to think about mental health. It takes a community to support teen mental health—a community, like a college campus.
John MacPhee:
A school told us a story about a young woman who had decided actually to die by suicide and as she was on campus, and proceeding to put that plan into place, a security guard saw her and watched her and noticed her. That security guard had been trained to recognize somebody who was in distress and actually acted upon his instinct that she was not okay and went and spoke to her, asking her direct questions.
She admitted that she did have a plan to die by suicide. He took her to the counseling center, right then and there. She was triaged and given care and then went into a care plan and is now okay. It turns out mental health support doesn’t just prevent tragedies. It helps kids succeed.
In fact we have clear data that shows that when schools put effort into implementing a mental health safety net and taking efforts to reduce risks for suicide, that there are large increases in the number of students getting mental health care.
Actually the schools also see benefits in first year retention rates and graduation rates as well, because mental health is health, and when you tend to mental health, then you’re more likely to flourish and thrive. Mental health is not “all in your head.” The mind affects the body, and the body affects the mind. Kids need to care for both to grow into healthy adults.
But there are a lot of challenges. The pandemic. Social media. Bullying. Some stressors are new. Some are timeless. With all that going on, it’s not surprising teen mental health is on the decline. In 2021, nearly one in three students experienced poor mental health.
Maintaining good mental health isn’t easy, and even the best of us struggle from time to time. When it comes to your kid, when’s the right time to get involved? Should they be in therapy? How do you help your kid feel comfortable talking about uncomfortable things?
Dr. Angela Mattke:
This episode, we’ve got two guests to help us out: John MacPhee and Dr. Laura Erickson-Schroth. They’re both from The Jed Foundation, a leading nonprofit that protects emotional health and prevents suicides for our nation’s teens and young adults. John MacPhee is JED’s CEO. He brings 25 years of leadership and management experience from business and not-for-profit settings to his role at JED.
Dr. Laura Erickson-Schroth is JED’s Chief Medical Officer, as well as a practicing psychiatrist and associate professor of psychiatry at New York University. She’s provided thousands of patients with crisis intervention and mental health support in psychiatric emergency rooms across New York City, and at the Hetrick-Martin Institute for LGBTQ Youth.
While it might be obvious to some people, I think it’s an important thing to establish. Why is mental health important?
Dr. Laura Erickson-Schroth:
I would say that mental health is important because of the ways that it affects individuals and the ways it affects our society. I think almost everyone listening has probably been given one of those screeners for depression at your PCP’s office or at an urgent care visit, and it asks questions like how often do you have little interest or pleasure in doing things, or how often do you feel down, depressed, or hopeless?
There’s also a scale that you don’t hear much about, which is called the flourishing scale, and I love this scale. It has statements like, “I lead a purposeful and meaningful life, my social relationships are supportive and rewarding, I’m optimistic about my future.” When someone’s mental health is good, they score higher on the flourishing scale. They’re able to see the joy in their lives, to feel connected to other people, to feel a sense of purpose.
It doesn’t mean that things are easy. Even when mental health is good, we’re going to have times where we feel sad or angry or afraid or experience difficult emotions. But as challenges come up, they can navigate those challenges and they can think creatively and that makes their lives better.
Also when individuals are doing well, when they’re flourishing, our society does better. People who are flourishing have more emotional energy to work together, to cooperate, to solve problems as a group. It creates a better society for everyone.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
That’s a great way to think about it. Good physical health versus poor physical health feels like a really obvious distinction because you can see it in kids’ bodies and how they move. But with mental health, It can feel a little more invisible to someone on the outside. What does good mental health look like and what does poor mental health look like?
John MacPhee: I really like the World Health Organization’s definition of mental health. Their definition says that mental health is a state of well-being that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, realize their abilities, learn and work well and contribute to their community.
Good mental health is, as Laura just said, it’s about flourishing. It’s about a state of well-being in which we’re contributing to our society, to our community, in ways that we want to. Good mental health though is not about never having difficulties.
It’s about being able to navigate our lives in a healthy way and seek help when we need it before we feel helpless or hopeless.
Now for parents, good mental health in your child, that looks like your children making friends, forming relationships, showing excitement about activities they’re involved in, having and building confidence in themselves, and feeling challenged and being challenged in good ways where they need to figure things out.
Poor mental health can show itself in a number of ways depending on the person. Some people may withdraw, they might keep to themselves or disengage from activities they previously enjoyed. They might not be able to get out of bed or clean their room or eat balanced nutritious meals. They may struggle more with their work or maintaining relationships.
For parents thinking about children, if your child is not doing well, you might notice that they’re not as interested in activities that they used to like, like sports, or dance, or school clubs. They may not be spending as much time with good friends. They may not be as engaged at school or talking about and looking forward to upcoming events.
The most important thing to know is that mental health issues look different in everyone and that noticing something is going on is about seeing a change in that particular person. It’s also about just trusting your own gut instinct that if you think something is going on with someone else or you think that something might be wrong, trust that judgment and lean into it. Now we sometimes think it’s a professional who might be most likely to notice something that’s going on, but it’s really the people who are closest to someone in the case of a child, their parents, or other adults in their lives who are really well positioned to do this.
Dr. Angela Mattke: It’s like physical health in that way: everyone’s baseline and what’s an issue for them is going to look different. Speaking of: We talk about mental and physical health like they’re two separate things, but really it’s all just health. What do we know about how they influence each other?
Dr. Laura Erickson-Schroth: There’s a phrase that a lot of us use in the youth mental health world, and it’s the phrase mental health is health. I think a lot of times the focus is on physical health, and that’s why it can sometimes be hard for us to recognize that there’s a health issue going on for someone that’s a mental health issue. Because we don’t learn about mental health in the same way we do about physical health. If someone’s hurt themselves or they’re in pain, we know how to get them to care right away. We know how to recognize that something’s going wrong, but we don’t have that same cultural approach with mental health.
In terms of how mental and physical health influence each other, it’s really bidirectional. Poor physical health can affect our mental health. Things like chronic pain or physical issues that limit our mobility.
Even when we eat, all of those things can affect our mental health. There are studies showing that, the more often we eat highly processed foods, the more likely we are to have symptoms of depression, difficulty controlling our emotions. That’s because our brains, which control our emotions, are part of our bodies.
All the parts of our body communicate with each other. On the positive side, good physical health can boost our mental health. Research shows that exercise, and that could mean going to the gym or playing a sport, but it could also mean walking your dog, cleaning up around your house, doing yoga, going dancing with your friends, all of these can improve our mood. That’s one of the reasons it’s important to encourage young people to participate in activities where they’re really moving their bodies because that can help them to develop these routines around exercise and this feeling of connection to their bodies that they can bring with them into adulthood.
On the flip side, our mental health can affect our physical health. There’s some straightforward ways that that can happen. Someone who’s dealing with depression may not be able to take care of their physical health as well. They may not shower often enough, brush their teeth. They may not eat well or exercise.
Our mental health can also have a direct effect on our physical health. Serotonin, which is a neurotransmitter that’s linked to mood. It’s the one that’s boosted by many antidepressant medications. We have serotonin receptors in our brains, but we also have them all throughout our intestines.
That’s one of the reasons that when we’re going through a hard time mental health wise, we sometimes have GI issues like stomach aches, nausea, constipation, diarrhea, those kinds of things, because all the different parts of our bodies, including our brains, are interdependent.
We’re used to thinking about mental health in terms of problems, but let’s remember the positives. Good mental health allows people to be well, work, thrive, and contribute to their communities. In your teens, this can look like making friends, spending time with family, being involved in activities, having self-confidence, and being willing and able to tackle challenges. Good mental health doesn’t mean you never have problems. It means you have the inner resources you need to handle them.
What’s more, mental health is health. In fact, mental and physical health can influence each other. To best support our teens, we need to make sure we’re caring for physical and mental health. But, today’s teens certainly don’t have it easy.
Dr. Angela Mattke: Being a kid or a teenager today is both the same and completely different than when we were kids. What new challenges are today’s teens facing when it comes to their day to day mental health and what hasn’t changed?
John MacPhee: First, one thing that hasn’t changed, of course, is that this is the age of expression for emerging mental illness. We know that, in about half of mental illness cases, symptoms are going to first show themselves by age fourteen and in three fourths of the cases by age twenty-four, then about one in five people will experience a mental illness every year.
But also there certainly is a lot that has changed and I can say that from my perspective a Gen X or, there’s a lot of factors to consider here. There’s so much information coming at young people today, far more than in the past, right? Just the news, the media. It’s absolutely overwhelming. Unfortunately, a lot of that news is negative. That’s what sticks. That’s what sells. That’s what’s getting pushed to young people.
We’re still dealing with COVID and all of the associated fallout. Global rates of childhood depression and anxiety doubled during the pandemic, and there’s a lot of grief and loss and loss of social, emotional, learning, development and isolation that is still impacting young people today.
They spend a lot of their time online also. This is clearly a very large change. Forty-six percent of teenagers, aged thirteen to seventeen say they use the Internet almost constantly. These algorithms that they’re facing and the business of being online, I would say the young developing brain is no match for what those algorithms are and represent.
There’s also just a great deal of macro environmental stress right now. Racism, school shootings, mass shootings, war, climate change—there’s stress that young people are absorbing, with nearly sixty percent of young people aged sixteen to twenty-five saying they’re very, very worried about the climate as an example.
Young people are sleep deprived as well, perhaps more sleep deprived than previous generations. The data also show they’re spending less time outside, less time face to face with friends and family. I think it’s important when we think about online lives, the opportunity cost of that. Then how are we spending our time? Then there’s less time being spent outside, less time being spent face to face.
As it relates to suicide and risk around suicide, we’re very worried in the suicide prevention field about firearms and the growing number of firearms in households. It’s estimated that 4.6 million children are living in households with at least one loaded and unlocked firearm.
Then access to health care. Once we know a young person needs mental health care, it’s hard to get mental health care and it’s hard to get affordable and culturally competent mental health care. There’s a lot happening here, but young people are remarkable today. They want to talk about mental health. They want to make the world a better place. They want to help their friends, and their families. They have high expectations. They really, really are bringing a lot of strengths and a lot of assets to the world.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
Teens are dealing with a lot. But there’s also been a drop in risky behaviors like drinking, drugs, and sexual activity, which you’d think would be linked with improved mental health. What do you think the connection is?
Dr. Laura Erickson-Schroth:
I think there’s actually a link between substance use, sexual activity and mental health in a way that we might not always talk about. We know the traditional ways these kinds of things are linked. We often talk about young people using substances when they’re struggling with their identities with fitting in with mental health issues and we sometimes see young people engaging in sexual activity in ways they’re not emotionally prepared for if they’re having a hard time. But to me, what also jumps out is that these are activities that young people typically do together. Their social activities.
We, of course, don’t want them to be using substances or getting into sexual relationships in ways that are harmful to them. But as they get older and they’re beginning to explore themselves and their bodies and their relationships to other people, we do want them to be able to safely navigate intimate relationships, navigate worlds where they’re going to encounter substances. This generation has less of a chance to do that because they’re spending less time with each other.
Before the pandemic began, we were already seeing significant changes in social connection across age groups, but especially for young people. For young people, fifteen to twenty-four hours spent in person with friends dropped by more than half even before the pandemic began. If you look at studies from around 2003 in the early two thousands, young people were spending about two and a half hours a day in person with friends.
By the time the pandemic began in 2019, it was about an hour a day. Once it hit 2020, it was 40 minutes a day. There are these major societal shifts, some of them related to the rise of digital connection, that have really affected young people.Today’s teens have a lot to deal with: COVID, the internet, lack of sleep, gun violence, climate change—way different stuff than previous generations had to deal with. On top of that, the teenage years are when mental health symptoms begin for a lot of people.
Risky behavior has dropped, and that sounds encouraging… until we consider why: less social time. The rise in digital connection has decreased the amount of time teens are spending together in person. These dwindling social lives have a big effect on mental health. Growing up is difficult enough without all of these new challenges. It’s no surprise teens might need help getting their mental health back on track—and that’s where parents come in.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
There are a lot of different things that can affect mental health and often a bunch of factors really snowball together. Teens might not be so great about asking for help as we all know. When it comes to figuring out what’s up with your kid, where do you even start?
John MacPhee:
It can be hard for a parent to know how to approach these conversations. Because our generations really weren’t taught about mental health necessarily, or even taught to keep it to ourselves. First, I just want to acknowledge that parents should also check in with themselves, and really think about and put care into how they’re caring for their own mental health. It’s like the airplane analogy of putting on your mask first before helping the other person. You really can’t help your young person if you’re not helping yourself.
Also there’s the modeling aspect. If the young person sees you really prioritizing your own mental health and care, they’re more likely to open up themselves and model that behavior.
To build a family culture where mental health is talked about, bring it up, bring up mental health, talk about it, make it a natural thing to discuss, be open that everyone including adults feels overwhelmed at times. You can share your own coping skills and strategies with your family openly.
When you’re ready to reach out for an important conversation, or you’re worried about your child and you just have that gut feeling like something’s going on, you can start by finding a place where there are no distractions. Put your phone aside and then just ask, “Hey, is something going on? I’m here to listen,” and then really actively listen without making judgments and don’t jump in to try to fix things too quickly.
Actually today’s thirteen to seventeen-year-olds are more comfortable and more willing to talk to their parents about struggles than just a few years ago, but they want to be listened to and they don’t want their parents to just jump in and try to fix their problems right away or tell them what to do.
If you’re having trouble finding a way to start the conversation, you can name something specific you’ve noticed about their behavior. I’ve noticed you’re doing X, Y and Z, or I noticed you’re spending more time in your room or less time with your friends, so you can try to pinpoint something like that and then communicate your concern directly.
That’s less easy for the young person to brush off and take them really seriously. If they open up about self-harming or thinking about suicide, that’s really difficult to hear, yet it’s also difficult for them to share. Acknowledge that and how great it is that they’re sharing and asking for help.
If they do bring up thoughts of suicide, ask them for more information. If you’re concerned and they don’t bring it up, ask about whether they’re having suicidal thoughts. Research shows that contrary to popular belief, asking about suicide does not give someone ideas. It typically provides a sense of relief and increases the likelihood that they will reach out for help and share how they’re feeling.
An example of language that you could use, if a young person says, “I’m struggling with my mental health,” we can respond with, “I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m glad you shared with me. What are you feeling exactly? What do you think you are struggling with? Why do you think you’re struggling?”
Or if someone tells us I’m thinking about suicide, we can respond with, “How long have you been feeling this way? What can I do to support you? I’m sorry that you’ve been struggling. I’m here to help you and to listen. I don’t have all the answers, but I can help you find someone you can talk with.”
Dr. Angela Mattke:
I was kind of chuckling along when you were talking about trying not to solve their concerns for them. With my teen, when he’s frustrated, I always start with, “Is this a listening conversation or is this a conversation you want mommy to help with?”
Because I think as a parent it’s so hard to hold back and not want to jump in and just fix things for them. We do not want them to have to experience all those big emotions, but it’s also important for kids to experience emotions and to not just try and put a BandAid on it and make everything go away because experiencing emotions is part of what makes us human too.
Dr. Laura Erickson-Schroth:
I love what you said about offering the choices. Do you want this to be supportive or do you want me to jump in and brainstorm with you how to fix this, it also models for them how they can be supportive for other people in their lives.
John MacPhee:
I love that. Another point I’d like to make here is this idea of supportive adults. We know they’re so protective in young people’s lives. It’s one of the action items the Surgeon General included in his report about a youth mental health advisory about building supportive adult relationships.
I think parents and caregivers can also think about, grandparents, aunts and uncles, family, friends, really trying to build that broader network of adults that can be mentors and supportive adults and reach out to your young one, so that there’s a broader safety net that’s in place that can have these kinds of conversations.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
Also it’s really important for parents to not feel threatened by that safety net. Some parents are so wanting to know everything their kids are feeling and they feel very threatened if there’s another adult and just being okay with that and just being happy that your child has that supportive network is so key because if they have that one trusted adult in their life, I feel a little bit of sense of relief with my patients, knowing that at least there’s some adults that they will go to if things get really bad.
With all that being said. At what point should you consider sending your kid to therapy or should all kids be in therapy?
Dr. Laura Erickson-Schroth:
Therapy can be really helpful for young people who are struggling. If your child’s having an especially hard time related to something that’s going on in their life, like a death in the family or bullying at school or, dealing with mental health symptoms, it’s important to make sure they have someone in their life that they can connect with about that.
There’s a misconception that therapy is just for people who have a diagnosed mental health disorder, which isn’t true. For some people, therapy can be a great space to just talk about what’s going on in your life; learn about how to process things in healthy ways, and deal with unresolved issues. It can be a great tool for young people to equip them with life skills and allow them room to mature emotionally. It can also help young people who might be going through big life changes, like a parent’s divorce, to process how they’re feeling and prevent things from moving towards more serious mental health symptoms.
Therapy isn’t for everyone, and some young people won’t find the right fit or won’t be ready to explore their emotions in that kind of way. There are lots of other ways that young people can learn about their emotions and explore their identities and figure out what they want to do in their lives and who they want to spend time with.
In addition to therapy, I’d encourage connection of any kind, the more time they can spend with peers, with supportive adults, the more they’re going to learn about themselves and how they can best navigate the world.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
Many times people ask me, “What’s one thing you could fix in health care or with your kids’ school environment.” My response is always could we teach DBT skills starting in 5th and 6th grade and have it as part of mandatory curriculum in all schools.
DBT is a type of therapy, but it has really, really incredible impacts and understanding, emotions and processing and dealing with them, and I just see it being so immensely beneficial for so many kids if they had those tools before they were actually in crisis.
Dr. Laura Erickson-Schroth:
That’s a good point. We want to make sure that we’re building those kinds of skills to the curricula at our children’s schools. It’s very important to teach young people about recognizing their emotions and then being able to act on them in ways that they’ve thought about and that they’ve learned and have helped them to cope over time.
John MacPhee:
This is also a place where we talked about parents and modeling, where you can talk about therapy and you can talk about going to therapy yourself or other family members and really set the tone that it’s a very helpful way to take care of our own well-being.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
I think therapy needs a rebrand. I feel like it needs to be reframed as a feelings checkup, or a feelings doctor or something like that. What about warning signs that a mental health crisis has become life-threatening and might need immediate intervention?
Dr. Laura Erickson-Schroth:
The first thing to say is that I’d like to provide a little bit of assurance that most mental health issues aren’t an emergency. There are some signs to watch out for that might indicate that it would make sense to seek immediate attention. One of those is if a young person is expressing suicidal thoughts and they have a plan for how they would carry those out, or they’re suggesting that they might act on them.
Often, people will have chronic thoughts about suicide where they don’t have any intention of hurting themselves right away. It’s just thoughts like, “I wonder what it would be like if I weren’t alive?” Those can stick around for a while. That’s the time to get them connected to a therapist, someone who can help them to figure out what’s driving those thoughts, but they might not need to go to the ER right away in that circumstance.
There’s another situation where the ER is really important, and that’s if their behavior is indicating that they’re doing things that are really reckless or putting them or other people in immediate danger. It can be really normal to not be totally clear on what category a situation falls into. If you’re not sure what to do, 988 is always an option. That’s the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can call, text or chat 988 and you don’t actually have to be in an acute emergency situation. You can call if you’re concerned about mental health for yourself or for someone else, and they can actually provide you with local resources, even if it’s not a crisis.
What I always tell families is that it’s important to have a plan for how you’re going to deal with a crisis before the crisis happens. Even before your child has any concerns that would lead you to seek out mental health help. I say look up local resources, talk to your pediatrician, know where you can reach out for help if you need it and which emergency room would you go to if you did need help? What numbers would you call? We should all have a mental health emergency plan the way that we have plans for our physical health, for natural disasters, things like that. It’s really important to have a plan in advance.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
Parents always look at me with alarm when I’m creating their mental health action plan, but I always normalize it. We talk about what to do if there’s a fire. We talk about what to do if the carbon monoxide alarm goes off. We talk about what to do if there’s a tornado. This is the same idea. Those things usually never happen, but you want to make sure you know what to do because at that moment, you’re really stressed.
If your kid’s going through a mental health crisis first, you’re going to be worried for your kid. But a lot of parents also might feel like they’ve done something wrong or feel like maybe it reflects on them as a parent. They’re probably going to have their own mental health challenges while trying to support their kid. What kind of resources are available to parents to help them look after their own mental health?
John MacPhee:
Parents really need to give themselves grace in a break on this in terms of feeling guilty or feeling like they did something wrong. To struggle with our mental health is so common, and it’s really important for parents to pay attention to their own mental health and well being. There’s a recent study out of Harvard’s group, which is called the Making Caring Common Project, and it recently showed that there’s a strong link between the mental health of parents and the mental health of their adolescent children.
According to the study, it showed that depressed teens are about five times more likely than non-depressed teens to have a depressed parent. Anxious teens are about three times more likely than non-anxious teens to have an anxious parent. Something to say up front is that if your child is struggling with their mental health, it’s not your fault.
Those statistics might even make you think it’s your fault, but it’s just not your fault. As parents, think about what you can do to take care of your own mental health, and get a mental health checkup and look at therapy and getting care because the better prepared you are in terms of taking care of yourself, the better you’re going to be able to support everyone around you, including your child.
One of the things that holds thirteen to seventeen-year-olds back from sharing information with their parents is if they think their parents already have enough on their plate, they’re actually thinking about protecting their parents. Taking care of ourselves as part of this is really critical.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
The JED Foundation’s Mental Health Resource Center, you asked about resources, has tons of resources and information for young people, parents and educators on all kinds of topics related to mental health, and you can find that@jedfoundation.org. Health resource center. You mentioned the statistic that looked at teens who had anxiety or depression and the mental health of their parents. Is that ever a causal relationship?
Dr. Laura Erickson-Schroth: T
The thing is that there are so many factors that influence each person’s mental health. You could certainly say when a young person is struggling, it affects their parents mental health. That when a parent is struggling, it affects the young person’s mental health. Then there are also things coming from the outside. Two people in the same family are experiencing a lot of the same stressors.
They might both be going through a really difficult period because something’s going on in the family or in the community or the town or the city that they live in, or the country that they live in or the world, we’re all going through a pandemic.
There’s so many different ways that these kinds of things can interact. I think parents jump to, “it’s my fault” if my child has mental health issues, you’re not the only person that they spend time with. They spend time in a world with many, many other people. Many children spend most of their waking hours in school with other people, and they also may have other things that are going on for them, underlying that things that you don’t necessarily know about, young people might be struggling with their identity, and they might not be ready to talk to someone about that.
Agree with John, sort of taking a little bit of blame off of yourself and that actually you’re the person who really cares and is there to help.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
One thing I sometimes tell my families is, if your child had cancer or you had cancer, we probably wouldn’t be looking for who caused this cancer. Who’s at fault? What’s the reason for it? And that’s the same way we need to start to approach mental health too, is to accept that we’re experiencing these symptoms dealing with the here and now, and how do we move forward and help support this patient?
Laura, John, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing all that you’ve been doing with the Jed Foundation to really advance mental health for children and teens and young adults.
Dr. Laura Erickson-Schroth: Thank you so much for having us.
John MacPhee: Yes, thank you. When it comes to your teen, get ready to have those difficult conversations. Be open and caring. Don’t try to fix stuff right away, just be ready to listen. The conversation doesn’t have to be with you. Therapy is a great option for lots of kids. They can also talk to other supportive adults in their lives. The important thing is that they have someone who’s ready to listen and able to help them if they need it.
Last but not least, as a parent, your own mental health is super important. Taking care of your mental health gives you the inner resources you need to support your kid. It also sets a great example.
If you want to dig deeper, the Jed Foundation’s Mental Health Resource Center and more can be found at jedfoundation.org. There’s also 988, the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. It’s a great idea to look into resources now and have that mental health action plan ready. We can hope for the best for our kids, but we should also know what to do when things get tough.
Dr. Angela Mattke: That’s all for teen mental health. But if your kid has something else going on… or you have a topic suggestion, send us an email at mcppodcasts@mayo.edu or leave us a voicemail at 507-538-6272, and we’ll see if we can help you out.
Please remember, this podcast cannot provide individual medical advice and the discussion presented here cannot replace a one-on-one consultation with a medical professional. Plus, therapists have really comfy couches! Thanks for listening.
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