What is adolescent psychotherapy?
Adolescent psychotherapy is an established and widely accepted method of treatment. It is a necessary and important part of the comprehensive treatment of mental ailments in adolescents.
Psychotherapy consists of regular, usually weekly meetings between a teenager and a professional psychotherapist. Usually one meeting lasts about 50 minutes
During the meetings, in an atmosphere of acceptance and trust, they discuss current experiences holding back the teenager’s development or hindering his or her life goals. The goal is to work on resolving the symptoms of the illness, rebuilding self-esteem and self-confidence, and accepting greater readiness to take responsibility for their life decisions.
For many parents, having to refer their child to a psychotherapist for help is an uncomfortable situation, experienced as a parental failure or an expression of their own incompetence. In such situations, the psychotherapist can calmly explain that therapy is an opportunity to extend many positive, caring parental responses to help the teen recover from his or her crisis.
One example in which parents often come to the specialist is their child’s refusal to go to school. In such situations, the therapist considers whether the problem is a main symptom or perhaps a side effect of an ailment in which the young person experiences deep depression or experiences hallucinations and delusions. The therapist may then suggest a psychiatric consultation. Refusal to go to school may be due to difficulties in learning school material, which means that specific school difficulties and intellect need to be diagnosed at a psychological-educational counseling center. Unfortunately, often the reason for refusal to go to school is deeply traumatic experiences and events in the peer environment, which the teenager may be ashamed to tell his parents about. In such situations, the therapist may agree on the need to intervene in the patient’s school environment.
