A new treatment paradigm can empower parents to help their daughters reclaim their physical and emotional health, explains Cheryl L. Green, MD, in her new book. Heal Your Daughter: How Lifestyle Psychiatry Can Save Her from Depression, Cutting, and Suicidal Thoughts is a timely read as the US is in an unprecedented mental health crisis among teen girls. The book outlines how Lifestyle Psychiatry offers hope for parents for helping their teenage daughters with depression. Dr. Green kindly guest posts today.
The teen mental health crisis and how Lifestyle Psychiatry can help
Those of us in the mental health care professions have known about the crisis in adolescent mental health for many years. However, the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) just released a report, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (2011-2021), that highlights the problem with statistics that everyone can understand:
In 2021, 42% of high school students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, 22% seriously considered attempting suicide, 18% made a suicide plan, and 10% attempted suicide. For teen girls, the figures are even higher: 57% felt persistently sad or hopeless, 30% seriously considered suicide, 24% made a suicide plan, and 13% attempted suicide.
With nearly half of our teens experiencing depression and about a quarter considering suicide, the situation meets the definition of a crisis. Yet, our mental health system is already overrun.
There simply aren’t enough adolescent inpatient psychiatric hospital beds. And there aren’t enough adolescent mental health providers to accommodate this tidal wave of young patients.
What can be done?
CDC proposes that school-based mental health be expanded. But would more help at school alone be enough? Is there anything that parents and other caregivers can do within the home?
Fortunately, the answer is yes. Lifestyle Medicine arrived as a board-certified branch of medicine in 2017. Lifestyle Medicine provides evidence-based recommendations for how to improve health, including mental health, in six domains: nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress reduction, social and emotional connectedness, and detoxification from chemical substances.
Lifestyle Psychiatry, emphasizing the recommendations specific to mental health, has also arrived; its first textbook was published by the American Psychiatric Association in 2019. The recommendations of Lifestyle Psychiatry are readily implemented in the home.
What are the recommendations of Lifestyle Psychiatry?
1. For optimal nutrition to prevent, reverse, and treat deficiencies associated with depression, implement the Whole-Food, Plant-Based diet supplemented with vitamin B12. “Whole” means natural and unprocessed. “Plant-based” means 90 to 95% plants rather than animal-based products.
2.. For optimal fitness and to guard against a sedentary lifestyle, which can contribute to depression, teens should exercise 300 minutes each week. This could be 30 minutes 5 days each week, or 150 minutes each weekend day, or any combination of these that still adds up to 300 minutes per week.
3. For adequate sleep, adolescents require anywhere between 7 and 9 hours each night. “Sleep hygiene” is the set of evidence-backed guidelines that promote restful, refreshing sleep. Research shows that, of all sleep hygiene recommendations, the most important is getting adequate sunlight, which can mean anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes, depending upon the time of day.
4. Stress reduction, which consists of four things: decreasing the stressful events and requirements in teens’ lives down to manageable levels, increasing their resilience to stress with coping strategies, decreasing their perceptions of stress with therapies such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and increasing their awareness of support from family and friends.
5. Social and Emotional Connectedness, which speaks for itself. And
6. Avoidance of or detoxification from chemical substances such as alcohol, nicotine, cannabis, and others that have been shown to be harmful to the adolescent brain.
Addressing the crisis
The crisis in adolescent mental health is deep, and sufficient professional resources are lacking. But Lifestyle Psychiatry provides clear and definitive guidelines with which parents and other caregivers themselves can contribute to the mental and emotional well-being of their teens.
About today’s writer, Cheryl L. Green, MD
Dr. Cheryl L. Green is a lifestyle psychiatrist based in Southern California and the author of Heal Your Daughter: How Lifestyle Psychiatry Can Save Her from Depression, Cutting, and Suicidal Thoughts and The Heal Your Daughter Workbook: Six Weeks to Feeling Good with Lifestyle Psychiatry.
Green works part time at the Loma Linda University School of Medicine, and part time in her own private practice based in the greater Los Angeles area. She holds degrees from Harvard University (A.B.), Princeton University (Ph.D.), and Stanford University School of Medicine (M.D.). She is board-certified in Psychiatry, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Lifestyle Medicine. Her passion is inspiring others to achieve vibrant physical and mental health. Find Cheryl L. Green on her website.
Top photo: Meet Cheryl L. Green, MD. Photo used with Cheryl’s permission.
Hi Christy great tips but reading this I thought almost impossible to get teenage girls to follow these! When my youngest was a teen she wouldn’t even answer the phone to let me know when she was coming home when she was when out! We must try though, the mental health crisis is frightening and the world is getting tougher for youngsters and young adults too. My youngest daughter now lives in Manchester and the rents are ridiculously high. She is lucky she has parents who can help her. But this dis-empowers her and upsets her.
Also major problem in my opinion is time off social media. My eldest is a teacher and she mentions this dependence on phones time and again. The pandemic has stripped social skills and made the online socials more powerful. So, yes getting out exercising is super important but easier said than done. It almost has to come from the kids themselves for the others to buy into it. If only…
Hi Marje, thanks for sharing your experience to provide a kind of reality check here. It’s hard to change someone else’s lifestyle or anything else, whether they’re a daughter or anyone else.
As for social media, aiiii, it’s good that it provides information but you’re quite right that the addiction is real… I can only imagine it getting worse too… And youngsters don’t know a time when there WASN’T social media, which is scary. It’s become daily life…
You make very good points here!
Hi Christy it is scary. All we can do is be there for them and hope that they will understand this as they grow older. Love, support and listening are vital.
Thank you for sharing that, MJ xxoo
Pleasure Christy. x
xx
Hi Christy, this is an excellent article. I wish everyone with teenage children would read it.
Hi Robbie, teens at home can be a *challenge* shall we say! But seriously, the mental health crisis teenagers are facing is alarming, so I’m glad that doctors like Cheryl are providing tips to help. I only hope that more families read and follow them! Thanks too for the social shares 💗
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