As a fellowship trained and board certified Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist, I have expertise in helping youth and families. And, I bring a holistic/integrative perspective to my work with youth that is not commonly provided. Your child will be the most important person in the room. And you, as a parent are the expert on your child. I will always value your input while giving voice to your child’s needs and concerns.
Our Initial Appointment
Assessments of adolescents and children involve time spent alone with the parent/guardian and time spent alone with the youth. We then meet all together and decide on the optimal path forward. I prefer to do this all at once, however, we can split this up into two sessions if necessary.
We will go over forms and questionnaires you will have filled out prior to our appointment and discuss how your child has developed over the years and come to the place they are currently. We’ll go over psychiatric, medical, trauma, and lifestyle factors that may be relevant to understanding what may be troubling your child. I will explore with your son or daughter their perspective on things. Oftentimes, youth are (or have been) on a variety of medications without lasting benefit. If this is the case, we’ll try to tease out what has worked, what hasn’t, and why.
Typically it’s not just one thing that is causing your child to struggle. Figuring out what has conspired to make your child struggle is the most important task. We’ll try and connect the dots, understand the why, and then come up with a plan that you feel confident with.
We will put together a menu of treatment interventions that can attack the issue from various sides. Multiple strategies working together at once tends to produce better results than just one intervention. The integrated approach considers medications, therapy, body imbalances, and lifetsyle habits. We don’t want to leave any stone unturned.
If parents are divorced, we will need to discuss who has legal custody to make decisions. If both parents, we will need to carve out time to ensure each has the opportunity to participate in treatment (to the extent desired), and also be involved in decision-making.
Follow up sessions
These sessions can be 25 or 50 minutes. We’ll meet regularly to assess how your child is doing and what changes, if any, may need to occur. These changes may be medications, herbs or botanicals, sleep suggestions, or wellness suggestions such as diet, exercise, habit changes, or other factors. The goal will be for your child to keep moving along on their path to wellness.
Frequency will vary and can be every few weeks up to every several months, if stable. Parental participation will be needed (more or less, depending on the age). Parental input is always valued. In the case parents with joint custody who each want to be involved in decision-making but won’t meet together, 50 minutes follow up sessions are needed.