Book Text:Parenting the Mentally Ill Adolescent in America: A Guide for Real Families By Wendla A. Schwartz, MD

 Parenting the Mentally Ill Adolescent in America: A Guide for Real Families

By Wendla A. Schwartz, MD

Preface

 Over the last 20 years I have been professionally engaged exclusively in work with psychiatric patients and their families. During that time I can estimate I have conducted tens of thousands of patient visits and had the opportunity to complete thousands of diagnostic evaluations. I have been lucky enough to work with an extraordinary group of patients of highly varied backgrounds in many different clinical settings. Working with people in outpatient and inpatient settings, private practice and public hospitals, large  metropolitan emergency rooms and small town offices, on the West coast and in the deep south, I have seen adolescents and families handling difficult situations with all sorts of psychiatric diagnoses and their consequences. Together with other specialists we have developed treatment plans involving a myriad of interventions: medical, psychosocial, behavioral, nutritional, alternative etc...While I have found it to be  true that each adolescent patient  is as unique as their fingerprint, I have also found something strikingly similar. Many have parents who benefited from a few, not too complex, suggestions that I found myself making repeatedly. These are suggestions and recommendations addressing real life issues facing everyday families trying to live life in this country while coping with the often Herculean task of raising a teenager with a mental illness.

As two of my own children became teenagers, the true power of adolescence became a reality in my life. I have discovered the forces arising during one’s journey from young teenager to adulthood do not politely move aside because we are coping with fatigue, stress, illness or anything else. Hormones, brain chemistry, altered social structures, grand shifts in body design and metabolism, not to mention individual evolution of abstract thought, moral structure, and spiritual foundation interact to reduce the average teenager to a confused, emotional, difficult and sometimes volatile remnant of the happy and robust child they were just months earlier.  For children with mental illness those forces can prove somewhat more challenging and are usually complicated by other factors. Those factors include psychiatric symptomatology, medications and side effects.  I finally decided to put some of the  suggestions and recommendations that have worked for my patients down in this book. As I was already at the task of writing a book, it seemed practical to add a few extra bits about which I am often asked. So, I added some resource information to the end of the book: evaluation, treatment, psychiatric medications, testing and the like.

"Parenting the Mentally Ill Adolescent in America” is primarily a guidebook for parents and guardians. The book addresses the complex, challenging and at times overwhelming task of parenting in the context adolescent mental illness.  It seeks to underscore the fact that parenting does not end where illness begins. A teen diagnosed with diabetes will continue to need parenting.  Similarly a teenager with depression, bipolar disorder or autism does not cease to need parental guidance once they are diagnosed or simply because we recognize certain behaviors as not “normal.”  This book is meant to encourage understanding of teens and to offer education, inspiration and support to parents. Besides parents and guardians, the book will also be of great potential value to grandparents, other family members, teachers, counselors, members of the clergy, primary care physicians, mental health workers and anyone else with an interest or particular love for an American teenager. This book is limited to a discussion of children being raised in our contemporary American society exposed to cultural stimuli typical of America of the twenty-first century.  This book can be used both before diagnosis to assist a parent in determining whether there exist problems that warrant further exploration, and after diagnosis, to manage ongoing parenting issues. However, the book itself is not meant as a substitute for appropriate diagnostic evaluation or clinical treatment.



About the Author
Wendla A. Schwartz, MD is a Board Certified Psychiatrist. She received her Medical Degree at the University of California, San Diego in 1990, completed her Psychiatric Residency at UCLA in 1994 and completed a Fellowship in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at LSU New Orleans in 1996.   Dr Schwartz continues to practices psychiatry. She lives with her husband, also a Psychiatrist, in the Silicon Valley area of California. They have three children, two of whom are teenagers.

This text will be published in sections on this blog over the next several months in the hopes that it will provide ongoing support and information to families in need. 




Wendla A. Schwartz, MD Board Certified Psychiatrist Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Psychopharmacologist