Talking to friends about mental illness can be a challenging but ultimately rewarding experience. Here are some steps that can help:

Courage is essential because it allows individuals to confront fears and take action in difficult situations. This can lead to personal growth, overcoming obstacles, and standing up for beliefs and values. Courage also inspires others and can create positive change in the world.

Good news, bad news?

Bad News: Your teen's entitlement is probably your fault.

Good News: Raising independent kids is possible.

Our adult instincts drive us to protect children. Given a choice, we’d bubble wrap them. But we can’t. 

• We can prepare them to navigate the world. 

• We can support them in developing their character strengths.

• We can help them create human connections that allow them to thrive in good times and rebound (maybe even grow) in challenging times. 

We can build their resilience.

Perhaps you’re not having the best day, week… month… or year. I get it. Many feel the same.

So if you’re doing it tough right now, here are 10 truths to help you weather this ‘storm’ and come out the other side better than you went in.

Some teenagers are faking Tourette's and Dissociative Identity Disorder on YouTube and TikTok, and many others are led to believe that they may have ADHD, OCD, or depression after watching a short video. What's going on?

Growing up has never been easy, but it can seem even more daunting for families today. Adolescence is a time of significant change for kids, and dealing with emotions, school, and outside events can be overwhelming sometimes. As a parent, it’s important to help instill in your child healthy mental health habits that will last a lifetime and to know when something may be wrong and a conversation is needed. This blog post will help you better understand teen mental health and how to connect with your child.

For many, this can be the most challenging time of the year. In 2014, NAMI found that 64% of people with mental illness say the holidays worsen their conditions. In addition, a 2021 survey showed that 3 in 5 Americans feel their mental health is negatively impacted by the holidays.

Holiday anxiety: the only present you can more reliably expect from your family each year than new socks.

Every holiday season, many of us experience holiday anxiety whether or not we have to deal with holiday events. And while family may not be the root of yours, it likely belongs to a common group of anxiety sources that affect people as the time for vacations approaches.

It can be difficult to talk to your teen about struggles in life. Talking to them about emotional and mental issues can be even more difficult.

Fortunately, there are ways to be supportive that won’t cause more distress for your teen or adolescent. Psychologists have developed, as a guideline, a list of comments that you should learn to avoid. They also offer suggestions for different approaches that might help you reduce your child’s anxiety. Here are 5 of their tips, with a ‘don’t’ and a ‘do’ for each.

When you’re a new parent, you often have all sorts of ideas about how your child’s future will look. Most of all, you hope that they’ll live a long and happy life.

If your child is diagnosed with ADHD, Anxiety, ASD etc., you have a new range of possibilities to grapple with. Will your child deal with stigma due to their condition? How will it affect their future career and relationships?

The Peptok emotional-support hotline won’t fix all your problems—but it might make you smile at a time when you probably need some help in that department. The last few years have tough on all of us. With a global pandemic, shootings, political chaos and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s no wonder people are feeling particularly overwhelmed and anxious at the moment. But sometimes, the smallest thing can give you a tiny, momentary reprieve from it all. Like Peptok, a free emotional-support hotline created by elementary school kids.

Our outdated beliefs about depression are killing people.

Many know that yoga, exercise, meditation, and talk therapy can help reduce anxiety. But what do you do when trying to keep it together sitting in a classroom, in an empty waiting room, driving alone, or trying to sleep at night? 

Here are seven strategies she uses to help manage anxiety in the moment — and why they work to relieve stress. 

When you're a new parent, you often have all sorts of ideas about how your child's future will look. But, most of all, you hope they'll live a long and happy life.

If your child is diagnosed with ADHD, Anxiety, ASD, etc., you have a new range of emotions and possibilities to wrestle. Will your child deal with stigma due to their condition? How will it affect their future career and relationships?

It’s pretty easy to recognize the back-to-school jitters that emerge in children this time of year, but what’s less commonly understood are the anxieties that parents exhibit during this stressful transition period, especially in light of pandemics, school violence, volatile economy, etc.

Teens who hurt themselves aren't crazy and their self-injury doesn't mean they're suicidal. Instead, it just means they're having trouble coping with their pain in a healthy manner.

During these highly unusual times, as coaches face challenges and obstacles different from anything they’ve faced before, we must keep our eyes on a specific goal: the social‐emotional and mental health of our student‐athletes.

Talking to children about their thoughts, feelings, and experiences helps their healthy growth and development. When you talk to children openly about their day, you can learn about concerns or problems they are dealing with, help problem solve, and build their confidence for facing future difficulties. The more you talk, the easier it is when difficult topics come up!

As millions of kids across America begin the journey back to the classroom over the next month, an often quiet enemy is the Anxiety that many face. In normal circumstances this is common, but with the current state of our social experience, school shootings, political and financial unrest, natural disasters etc. It is important that parents feel quipped to set their kids up for a successful start to a new year. Most teens get a little anxious about starting school. A certain amount of school-related anxiety can be common for teens. But when nervousness crosses over into full-fledged anxiety in school, teens need extra support.