Parents can help teenagers with anxiety and depression

By Carolyn Aston

Re: ‘Teenagers more anxious and depressed’, by Amy Corderoy, published in The Age, July 10, 2014

Amy Corderoy’s article about the rise in teenage anxiety and depression, particularly amongst girls, is disturbing, but parents should not despair. As Dr Brian Graetz, acting Chief Executive Officer of Beyond Blue, stated, parents should focus on giving their children skills to cope with stress from an early age. “It’s skills around managing their emotions, particularly girls, before they get to puberty, they need to understand the need to talk about issues with mum and dad, and then mum and dad giving them confidence to manage these issues,” he said. “So if they do get anxious they have a strategy about how they are going to relax.”

CASSE’s Peaceful Schools Program will be covering these issues at its innovative conference ‘Peaceful Schools, Peaceful Parents – A Powerful Partnership to Maximise Student Performance and Wellbeing’, to be held in Melbourne on Wednesday 27 August 2014. For more information visit: https://www.casse.org.au/peaceful-schools-program/for-parents-2/parent-conference-2014/

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Carolyn Aston, Director of CASSE’s Peaceful Schools Program, and Therese Raulin, Deputy Director of CASSE’s Peaceful Schools Program, are both child/adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapists with extensive training and experience as mental health clinicians. They often work with the severe end of mental health issues in kids/teens and their parents/carers. Their ability to draw on this knowledge and experience and apply it to the school setting makes CASSE’s Peaceful Schools Program unique amongst other anti-bullying programs.