Mental Health Issues of Adolescents

How to deal with Mental Health Issues of Adolescents

The most widespread psychological sicknesses among youth are fretfulness in addition to mood and behavioral disorders.

Anxiety disorders include generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder and panic disorder. Anxiety disorders are clinically significant when they interfere with important areas of functioning, such as school, work, or relationships with family and peers. They often occur in conjunction with depressive disorders or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and are associated with an increased risk of suicide.

Physical symptoms are common for many anxiety disorders. Severe dysmenorrhea or chronic pelvic pain may be present in certain cases. Other symptoms include chest pains, palpitations, dizziness, syncope, nausea, vomiting, recurrent abdominal pain, as well as disturbances in sleep patterns, appetite and energy levels.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) now are classified separately from anxiety disorders.

In adolescents, limited coping skills associated with inadequate social supports, and a high frequency of central nervous system impairment, all contribute to the vulnerability of developing mental health problems.

Following are a few ways to treat mental illnesses among adolescents:

Improving family communication:  Improving the ability of families to address potentially debilitating mental disorders in the context of the family is a key to humane care. Improving communication about emotions and involving the child in the family in meaningful ways can reduce the consequences of isolation that lead to adverse outcomes.

Educating religious personnel about mental disorders in effort to establish a treatment alliance and appropriate referral:  A key resource for child and adolescent mental health care in communities are traditional and more formal religious entities. In rural and urban areas throughout the world religious leaders and institutions now shelter and otherwise support individuals with diagnosable mental disorders.

Primary health care, community care and schools: Primary health care workers, including physicians, have a very limited understanding of current concepts of diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders in children and adolescents. This hinders the ability to provide services to children and adolescents and may add to the stigma of mental disorders in these young people. Hence, it is a priority to get current knowledge in a usable form disseminated to practitioners and policy makers.

Continuum of care, guidelines and practice parameters: Developing a continuum of care requires an investment of financial resources and the training of professionals to utilize the spectrum of services included in a continuum.

Managed care:  Managed care refers to the oversight of the provision of healthcare including mental health care by outside parties to control costs and quality. The emphasis appears often to be on reducing cost and secondarily on providing a more uniform quality of care.

Direct marketing of medication: There is an increasing reliance on pharmaceutical companies for proper education about mental disorders. In this scenario the potential exists to short circuit appropriate diagnostic evaluation and to generate unwarranted concerns about certain disorders based on a naïve understanding of symptoms. It is recognized that there are limited indications for the use of 20 psychotropic medications in children and adolescents, and that most current use is “off-label”, though there is an encouraging trend toward supporting child and adolescent-specific treatment research designed to ascertain the appropriateness and effectiveness of psychopharmacological treatments in children and adolescents. Medication/diagnosis of specific approvals are now coming forth.