Guides to Counseling Careers & Other Resources

America is experiencing a mental health crisis, and mental health struggles amongst the nation’s youth are intensifying. Student mental health is in a precarious place, with children and teens exposed to more information, more social contact, and more discord than ever before. The student mental health crisis is pervasive.

Accidental injuries, a category that includes drug overdoses, are the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45—a situation that seems unlikely to change any time soon. A major contributing factor to this crisis is the opioid epidemic, which continues to ravage the country.

Many clients who struggle with substance misuse have experienced childhood or adult trauma. This is not to say every client who has had one or multiple past traumas will misuse substances. When treating clients with trauma, it is important to remember these experiences create a vulnerability in some individuals.

I subscribe to a number of medical newsfeeds, and the responses from the physicians to the GLP-1 agonists can only be described as “giddy.” Doctors spoke of their joy at “finally” having something that could help their patients lose weight.

Schools can be inclusive of transgender and nonbinary students and support them in initiating that conversation with peers and teachers; however, not all schools do, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2022 school profile data. The data released in March 2024 shows that the state a child lives in can impact whether or not they feel welcome at school—a dynamic with potentially deadly consequences for LGBTQ+ youth.

Somatic therapy focuses on the client’s physical experience by identifying how their body stores and releases stress. For many, this approach is quite intuitive, yet some anxious clients may initially struggle. Stressed out, over-caffeinated, and bouncing between past regrets and existential crises, they may have spent many years bypassing the discomfort in their bodies, doing mental gymnastics to stay cerebral.

Many families grapple with this question when trying to identify underlying mental health issues their child may be facing. Still, it is a complicated question. Throughout the stages of development—from toddlerhood to the preteen years and beyond—different challenges emerge, and each stage is defined by very different behaviors.

Many clients disconnect from their thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations to mentally survive. The practice of mindfulness helps clients heal by teaching them techniques that bring their attention to the present moment.

Over the past few years, teens have experienced an alarming increase in mental illness in the U.S. The 2010s, in particular, marked a decade of declining mental health capped off by the disruptive impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. By 2022, national survey data from the Department of Health and Human Services indicates that around one in every five adolescents suffered from a major depressive episode in the previous year, continuing an upward trend in depression that began around 2013.

Anticipatory grief is a form of grieving before a death or loss. It can present at the end of life, during a terminal diagnosis, the end of a meaningful relationship, or a significant life shift. For some clients who have experienced trauma, anticipatory grief can appear at any time during the life cycle, being triggered by traumatic stimuli.