Therapy for Adolescents
Adolescence is a period that can be intense and overwhelming to navigate at times. There are many different types of challenges that adolescents face, from academic, cognitive, physical changes, social, emotional, family, and other important areas of life. Given the many types of changes present during this stage of life and the developmental variation during the teenage years, therapy with adolescents must account for both an emerging sense of self and independence through diverse challenges, as well as a need to feel supported and understood.
Making the transition from childhood to adulthood has never been easy for anyone, but the traditional challenges associated with adolescence are exacerbated by our current age of the Internet, social media platforms, and a new kind of peer pressure and desire to belong that has never existed before in human history. All of these factors create enormous possibilities accompanied by great instability and confusion for adolescents and their families.
Our mission is to provide collaborative, compassionate, and effective assessment and therapy to promote growth and change. We offer a welcoming environment for teenagers to explore their concerns and are committed to providing a positive treatment experience.
- Commonly addressed areas of concern for adolescents
- Commonly addressed diagnostic conditions for adolescents
- What to expect in therapy for adolescents
- Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) for adolescents
Commonly addressed areas of concern for adolescents include:
- Behaviour problems, emotion regulation, and maladaptive anger
- Family stress (e.g., loss, separation, divorce, blended families, strained relationships with siblings)
- Managing difficult emotions such as sadness, fear, and shame
- Perfectionism, procrastination, and self-criticism
- Eating disorders
- School and learning-related difficulties (e.g., poor grades, school refusal, coping with symptoms of ADHD)
- Social difficulties (e.g., conflict, loneliness, isolation, bullying)
Commonly addressed diagnostic conditions for adolescents include:
- Anxiety Disorders such as Panic Disorder, Agoraphobia, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder and other fears and phobias
- Depressive Disorders (e.g., situational sadness related to loss, transitions and grief, as well as chronic sadness and irritability)
- Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
- Psychoeducational assessments for Learning Disabilities, ADHD, and Autism Spectrum Disorder (please see Assessment Services for details)
What to expect in therapy for adolescents
The beginning steps of treatment involve a thorough and collaborative treatment plan to address the core of your concerns. We develop our treatment plan based on a psychological assessment to explore how your issues impact on, or are affected by, different areas of your life. In addition to a clinical and diagnostic interview, as psychologists, we are trained to use a range of psychological measures that can clarify specific concerns and inform our treatment planning. This can be very important as some clinical issues may look similar on the surface but are quite different and will affect the way treatment is guided.
Depending on individual goals, therapy can be short-term for a specific issue or longer-term. Some individuals experience improvement very quickly (4-8 sessions) but generally treatment length ranges from 12-20 sessions for issues such as moderate anxiety or depression. More chronic patterns of thinking, feeling, or behaving may require longer term treatment. Therapy is a collaborative process and your progress and goals will be discussed during the course of treatment.
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for adolescents
Treatment for teenagers at Toronto Psychology Centre is informed by cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), which has been found, in decades of clinical trials, to be effective with a range of emotional difficulties for children, adolescents, and adults. It is a relatively short-term and active treatment approach that is collaborative in nature. We value an evidence-based model of care to ensure you are receiving the highest quality of treatment.
How CBT works in treatment for adolescents
Conceptualizing a problem using the CBT model involves examining the context of your concerns (i.e., the environment from which distress develops or is exacerbated) and the way in which thoughts, feelings, and behaviours interact.
Treatment involves addressing unhelpful/maladaptive thoughts and changing behaviours that maintain distress. CBT can be a practical and empowering form of treatment as it encourages testing out and challenging negative patterns both inside and outside of therapy sessions. Application of in-therapy tasks to real-life situations is encouraged within a spirit of collaboration, as it can help foster a sense of mastery in dealing with emotional distress and upsetting experiences.
Together, we collaborate on interventions that meet the core of your difficulties to help promote change in areas of your life that are important to you.
Please contact us to find out more about Therapy for adolescents.