WMH Season 4 Ep 5: The Teen Mental Health Crisis: What Families Need to Know

This is a transcript of Watching Mental Health Season 3, Episode 5 which you can watch and listen to here:

Katie: Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Watching Mental Health, and I am very excited because today we're going to talk about a super important, timely, relevant topic that I think is at the top of mind for a lot of Americans. And my special guest today is Mendi Baron. He's a nationally recognized expert in teen mental health and in family related issues with years of experience providing therapy, consultation and intensive coaching to both adolescents and families. Mendi understands the complexities of teen mental health issues that are common today. Whether you're a parent grappling with your teen's challenges or you're a young adult navigating that tricky transition into that adult life, which I think I'm still trying to navigate. Mendi is here to support your journey and I'm really excited because he's going to come on and we're going to talk about practical strategies, personal stories, and really just the reassurance that you're not alone and that no situation is too challenging when it comes to youth mental health, teen mental health, and family mental health. And so with that, let's bring Mendi to the show and welcome him to watching Mental Health.

Mendi: Hey, how's it going?

Katie: Doing well, thank you so much for joining me today and I'm really excited because you are a referral to me as a guest, and so I don't really know too much about you. So with that, I just want to start us off with asking a little bit more about who you are and why mental health is important to you and why Teen Mental Health in particular, or youth mental health is the specialty area you've gone into.

Mendi: Sure. Well, so my name is Mendi Baron, as you surmised. I'm an LCSW, so I'm a licensed psychotherapist. There's a particular thing about teenagers, right? Not that I've written off adults, but with teens and kids, if you can give a little bit of redirection at a younger age, you actually get the advantage of seeing the results of your work. A lot of times when you work with adults, you don't always see it with a kid. A small adjustment can go a long way and change the complete trajectory. So there's an advantage in the sense that you can see your work play out, which for a lot of therapists is really a wonderful thing because you don't always get to see that. Alternatively, kids know everything and can't learn anything. And so there's some challenges there, but it was a particularly interesting field to me because of that. And so I gravitated toward, I kind of gravitated to that population. It's a nuanced population, a challenging population. I think that parents always say, oh, my teenagehood was the best time of my life. And I'm like, well, you got puberty, you got friends, you got social media pressures, you have body image, you have school, you have college. There's a million things that you're navigating just going up a hill. So teenagehood is not as exciting as one would imagine.

Katie: So that's funny that you say that because I've always thought back when I was thinking about maybe being a teacher, I always thought, oh, I could be a teacher for elementary school kids, but middle school, that's for me, it all goes downhill. I hated my middle school years. I was not a fan. And then as you said, teenagers can be, they think that they know the world and that can be a challenging time. And so that's funny that other people are like, oh, I think teenagers are so easy. Being a teenager was so easy. I don't think that that's necessarily true, and I think that that's probably so untrue compared to how it used to be because of the technology and internet world that we live in. So talk to me more about that. Do you think that that's really had an impact on teen mental health?

Mendi: Oh, absolutely. One example, I can give you a few, but take bullying right back in the nineties, classic movies with the mullets and such, when you were being bullied in the school yard, some guy named Biff who was a jock was beating up the nerd with the pocket protector pushing down in the school yard. Everyone watches the kid goes home, licks his wounds, and in the classic movies, he comes back and takes revenge or whatever. And that was limited to the school yard and the parents and the

Katie: Exactly that

Mendi: Area nowadays, correct. Nowadays, when you're bullied, it's not just the school yard out come the cell phones. Now you're across social media. Now you're on the internet now 10 other schools are watching now you're everywhere. And for teenagers, we already know that being on the internet, you're there. That's it. And there's a sense of permanence that really impacts teens far greater and more often than not, although thankfully a little less recently, we see a lot of teen suicides for that reason because life as they know it in their minds is over and they think very permanently in black and white in that sense. Secondarily, obviously we all know social media body image. Our kids are being exposed more and more toward what is supposedly the perfect form. Now with ai, they're generating models that look even better than the real people. And

Katie: We could never be an AI

Mendi:

Model. Correct. So we start implanting unrealistic expectations. Again, back in the day, the newspapers or some magazines right now, you open your thing, it's just everywhere. And so you have unrealistic expectations. You have the influence of influencers doing stupid things like drinking challenges and dying of alcohol poisoning. Or in Las Vegas, actually last week, a bunch of teenagers tried to stage a takeover of some kind of shopping mall this's, a way to get shot pretty quickly.

Katie: Okay, yeah.

Mendi: It's the influences that they're seeing also that lead to a lot of negative behavior. And then I can go on, but the fourth one that also people don't often think of is the expectation, right? You're seeing people who are rich, who are wealthy teenagers who are making millions online. And so you have this internal expectation that you build that, Hey, I don't need to go to college. I don't need to do any of this. I can just hit it rich by doing X, Y, or Z. And then when it doesn't happen, that sense of failure is just crushing.

Katie: Yeah, that's really hard. That is crushing. And it seems like you touched on a few really key reasons why teenagers are, we're in such a youth mental health epidemic, and that word's been really thrown around for really since the pandemic. It feels like we came out of the pandemic and entered into this youth mental health crisis that we have not been able to get past, and it feels like a lot of people are just kind of swimming in it and they don't know what to do. So what are your thoughts on that? Are we making any improvements in this epidemic? How can we make improvements in this epidemic? What are your thoughts there?

Mendi: Sure. I mean, the epidemic had a massive impact. I think teen suicides went up like 300%, eating disorders, like 800%. The hospitalizations were up like a thousand percent. The epidemic represented an epidemic of solitude, right? You're talking about kids who are in their developmental stage, whose whole lives surround social interaction, who are cut off from their friends in the world as they know it for two years, compounded with the imminent fear of death at all times, compounded with lack of access to resources. You're not going to go out to your therapist during a pandemic. It's going to be a lot harder combined with just constant exposure during boredom to social media and all the things we just talked about is an epidemic in and of itself brewing right there. And kids lost one to two years of just socialization. They did basic interpersonal skills. So the pandemic really did lead to an epidemic, and we're still seeing the results, and we will see the results for quite a while.

Katie: That's too bad.

Mendi:

I mean, in terms of things to do about it, it's challenging. When I talk about clients, I refer to 'em as clients, not patients, because patients are doctors come in and fix them, right? Clients are people you help, help themselves, and it's very hard to help somebody regain two years of their lives. And it's very hard to help somebody get over the trauma and anxiety that the world's going to hell in a hand basket, and you're afraid of something have to do. They still walk around on

Katie: It. Yeah, it's still very present. That going to hell in a hand. Even for us adults, we walk around with our heads just because we're just so freaked out by the world.

Mendi: Correct. And you look on the news now, it doesn't help, right? No, everyone's dying everywhere. Things are exploding. People are fighting. It's terrible. It's a really crazy time to live. So that pressure really hasn't come off and has actually caused more of a pandemic of anxiety nationwide. But things to do about it right now are not really about fixing the past. They're about being present and moving into the future. For one thing, parents, obviously parents have to work, and not every parent can afford to put in the time necessary to be there, but as much as we can as parents being present for our teenagers, it's one thing to show up when things have already happened, when you've caught them in whatever or they've done whatever to themselves. But to create moments to set a stage for communication is critical. Whether that's like, okay, we're going to do dinner together twice a week, and for 30 minutes we're going to put our cell phones down, or I'm going to take, every Saturday I'm going to take, or every Sunday I'm going to take an hour and do whatever. That you create a moment for your teenagers where they know, Hey, it's a chill time. It's a time where there's openness, where there could be dialogue or where there's nothing at all, but there's connection, right? So that's part one. Part two, where we're really lacking is schools and training. So the kids are in school two thirds of their lives until they're 18. So the school in some way, which we shouldn't do, but parents leave the schools to raise their kids, and the schools are not adequately prepared

From a mental health standpoint, certainly to deal with that. And so a lot of kids, once again, back in the day, fewer kids struggled, and you're able to catch a lot of them. Some you didn't catch, but now more than 50%, the numbers are just astronomical. And so you don't even have enough staff or funding to catch the issues before they arise. So I think federal funding or funding for schools and more focus on mental health, greater training for teachers on recognizing mental health. What is a teenager being a teenager versus when am I looking at something more serious?

So those are pieces of it. And then the third piece is regulation. Parents often fear setting boundaries for their teenagers because they're afraid to cut them off or have them pull back because of that, parents walk on eggshells around their kids. Many try to be friends with their kids, and many struggle to hold boundaries. Things like bedtime, things like screen limits, things like where you go when you go with whom you go. Things like you. So many more parents are like, well, my kid's smoking pot, but what am I going to do? And pot people with pot isn't so bad when I was, but the pot of today is pretty darn bad. It's very different. Teens, prefrontal cortex is still developing, and it shrinks it. The prevalence of adolescent onset schizophrenia is increased exponentially because of the use of such substances. So they actually have quite a greater impact.

And third, who uses, not everyone who smokes pot uses heroin, but everyone who has used heroin started with pot. So there's a connection between filling a void and filling a void. It's not that one is a gateway to the other. It's that when you start using one to fill, then you keep going. And so parents are being a lot more lenient and lax with their kids thinking it's nothing but what the kids are doing is. And so setting boundaries is the third piece that I think parents struggle in, and really not recognizing that in some sense, setting boundaries is the ultimate form of love in this kind of situation.

Katie: Yeah. Wow. Wow, that's so interesting. Especially the pot thing that's new. And I think that a lot of parents, especially younger parents, they want to be cool, and they think it's not that big of a deal. But yeah, I mean, setting those boundaries is so key. And you've touched on a few really cool, I think, important things that parents can do. Just something as simple as those nightly dinners where you're shutting the screen off just small little actions. And so I love that you touched on some of that. So if there's any other recommendations that you have for parents, definitely touch on that now. But also any recommendations that maybe you have for teens who are struggling and maybe not sure where to turn or what to do.

Mendi: Sure. Parents, I can go on and on. I have a book coming out about it. But I guess one thing I'd add for parents is, and I tell us the parents a lot, especially when they show up in my office, and that is parents have a lot of guilt when they show up. What did I do wrong? Where did I fail? I must have done this, I shouldn't have done that. The divorce did X did Y did Z. And there's tremendous guilt. And so the first thing I tell parents is take off. The guilt is not helpful in any way, shape or form.

Kids aren't born with a manual. The manual didn't come out in the delivery room. So it's okay to make mistakes, but it's about what you do next. And what's most critical to do next is get educated. There are so many things our teens have access to today that we have no idea. If I said proxy servers, parents still don't know what that is, but that's five years old now. We're well past that dark web. So it's getting educated as much as you can on that. And also as it pertains to mental health issues, consult experts. There are people who are trained. There are people who have the experience, there are people who have the information. There are books, there are shows, there's everything. So you don't have to try to invent the wheel or reinvent the wheel, ask for help.

And help could also be from other parents. It could be like, share your experience with me and so on. And then one more thing for parents is you can use other parents, the school coaches, people around the kids to create a village, right? Back in the day when you referenced back in the day, the village raised the kids, you could walk through and one person would help you with this. One person would watch out for this, one person educates you on this. And obviously we don't have that, but you could sort of create that which parents are involved in your kids' lives, which coaches, which teachers. And so you create a network where you communicate, okay, here's what I saw. Here's what I noticed. Can you help with this? Can you help with that? So socially removed from each other that

Katie: That's a great idea. We operate in these silos with our kids and we don't have to correct,

Mendi: Correct. And the information age, we don't have to. So that's for parents, for kids, I mean, it's infinitely harder because our social circles are siloed, right? Back then you had your goths and your jocks and whatever. Now we've got so many more variations I can't even begin to count. And so for teens, it's a little bit harder. And you also can't really depend on your friends for advice, and you can't depend on the internet for advice who you're talking to.

Katie: Exactly.

Mendi: And predators take full advantage of that, and we see that all the time. So for teenagers, it's really about asking for help. And it's very hard to go to your parents and ask for help. But in most states, as early as 12 years old, or at least the age that you can consent to your own care, you can approach a therapist by yourself and you can ask for help. And they can keep it confidential as long as you're not a danger to yourself or others. And they can help you navigate those conversations with parents. But if you get a professional, that's your best bet. Unfortunately, they don't think that way. And so asking for help goes to the wrong people or comes in the wrong place. Obviously you could reach out to teachers, but you still never know. School counselors are definitely good options, and if your parents are the kind of parents who can respond appropriately, obviously reach out to them and say they may not have advice for you. A lot of kids are like, what the heck? Are my parents going to know about that? Or they're going to react crazy to that and just say, look, I don't want to talk to you about this. I love you, you love me. So for my sake, can you just find me somebody?

I get a lot of calls like that. I got one today. Okay. My son wants to talk to somebody. I don't quite know what it's about, but he needs to talk to somebody about it. And that happens a lot. Obviously if a parent cares about their kid, they're going to do what's necessary. Sweet. So that's the advice I can give teens. And on the flip side, don't open up to people you don't know. Don't open up to people who are going to be a negative influence. Don't take your friends. They're not experts. They may believe they have your best interest. They may be saying things they believe are correct, but most of the time you can't take that to the bank and it can go the wrong way.

Katie: Yeah, absolutely. No, that's so true. And asking for help is so important, but really hard for I think adults even. So for kids to ask for help, for teenagers to ask for help, I mean, that's tough, but that's what you need. And you're right to ask for help from the right people or from the right sources that can get you to the right people.

Mendi: Correct.

Katie: So let's talk a little bit more about those sources. You're here in Las Vegas, correct?

Mendi: Yes. I actually travel back and forth. I live in Maryland. I'm licensed in Las Vegas. I'm licensed in Maryland. I do a lot of work as a coach sort of across the country. I do a little bit of, I'm licensed in California too, so I service a couple different,

Katie: So this is cool. This is cool. So my next question really then is a little bit broader mental health here in Las Vegas. I'm sure, as you know, youth mental health we're 51 out of 51, right? We keep talking about it. What a fun number to say over and over again, but it's like what are we doing about it? How can we be making a change? But in particular, you have experience in different states. And so my first question around this is really just what are your different experiences in different states? Is there something that stands out to you that Nevada is doing that makes it maybe more challenging for our youth here to get access?

Mendi: Well, I'd say it's what Nevada isn't doing, making it more challenging. I think if you look at where the legislature is directing funds,

It's really not to that. In fact, the state was sued for failing to provide mental health care to a number of kids. I run residential treatment centers in Las Vegas for teenagers, and I can tell you they don't do a good job. Secondarily, as it pertains to insurance and coverage for the care in California, there are regulators who hold the insurance companies responsible to pay for mental healthcare for teens. There's no regulator in Nevada. And so the insurance companies run amuck and like the Wild West cover what they want, don't cover what they don't want, they

Katie: Do, and then they sit there and say, oh, yeah, we're practicing parody. We're doing this. But you're right, nobody is watching them. And you look on those lists and they're ghost lists, and they're not actually covering anything once you do find somebody that they might be in there. So it's really difficult to work with them.

Mendi: Correct. California has something called DMHC, department of Managed Healthcare. They have the department of insurance. If an insurance company's messing around, not falling parody, trying to discharge a kid too early, you can file a 72 hour urgent appeal or a 24 hour urgent appeal, and they will not just review it with their own team of doctors, but they'll ding the insurance company. If you're right, they'll charge a couple per client per day that they do this. Nevada is largely unregulated, does not have a very strong mental health system. The legislature is not focusing their funds there. And so yeah, your youth are going to be the ones who suffer. Our schools aren't adequately funded. We don't have a lot of mental health practitioners in the schools. Our police teams are grossly underfunded, and so we have gangs and all sorts of other stuff. Nevada's just not doing a good job. It's not about what we are doing, it's about what we're not doing. California is much more advanced in certain areas, not every area, but as it pertains to insurance coverage, as it pertains to mental health awareness, they start to do better, start to do better. I use that word very lightly, but at least in terms of your ability to get coverage for mental health, California's pretty good,

Their school system questionable, but they still do invest a lot of money in that. Conversely, they've had a lot of people stealing millions of dollars pretending to give therapy sessions to kids. But at least I think the mindset's in a better place.

Katie: And the fraud, I mean, fraud is there regardless. Correct.

Mendi: Maryland in particular, obviously there are no huge cities in Maryland outside of Baltimore. Baltimore is the second most dangerous city, I think, in the country, but outside of Baltimore, Maryland does invest very heavily in the school system. And obviously unfortunately, they invest in specific places, and there's a lot of issues in parity in terms of demographics that have to be fixed, and they're actively trying to work on fixing it. But for the most part, in a majority of areas, they do have a pretty robust educational system. They don't have as many kids. It's more of a spread out state, more of a rural state. So

Maybe they don't have as much volume either. It's not a massive city complex. The income variables are different. There's a lot of higher income locations in perhaps Nevada, so there's a lot of different pieces that sort of contribute to it. But I would say Maryland probably does. Well, California does. Okay. And Nevada just terrible. The second thing about Nevada is it does have a huge population in the hundreds of thousands of minorities who do not have access to quality mental health care, who from a traditional standpoint, the stigma around mental health care exists tremendously. And so even seeking help is somewhat problematic, and the unions that represent them put almost nothing toward that. And so they'll get 14 days of therapy or things like that, and it's very hard to do that for certain minorities. B, to have the time to do that. If you're working eight hours a day or 12 hours shifts to keep your family afloat, are you going to have time to take your kid to therapy? Very doubtful. So Nevada also has a massive population of underserved, overworking minorities whose kids also are being underserved as a result.

Katie: Need help. Yeah. Yeah, that's tough. That's hard. And I'm glad that you touched on the rules because people will say, oh, well, Nevada has a lot of rules. And so that's part of the reason, and that is, but that's not an excuse because there are plenty of other people. Correct. And Nevada's rural have rules.

Mendi: The Nevada's rural are underserved when they say rural Nevada means nobody's around.

Katie: Right.

Mendi: In Maryland, rural means these are neighborhoods and cities, but they're more spread out, more. It's different. It's more rural than the rural. But yeah, I hope they turn us around and I hope they start directing funds where they're supposed to be.

Katie: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the governor keeps saying it, so we'll see what happens with this legislative session too. But so what I'm hearing from you is we need better regulations.

Mendi: That's where it starts regulatory, where

Katie: It starts on our insurance. We need more funding, and we need the schools. I mean, we need more mental health in our schools, which I'm sure, as you know, our schools are definitely a struggle down here in Las Vegas in particular, but we have a new superintendent, so I'm on the side of hope. There's no other way to think, but there's nowhere to go but up. Right? That's where I'm at. Right.

Mendi: Hope is a blessing and a curse, but there's no other option. We can only hope at this point, right?

Katie: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, thank you so much for your time. This was really, really valuable. I want to end on this last question that I always like to ask my professionals. I think I know what your answer is going to be, but I want to just give you a chance to talk more on this. And really it's about if you think a mental health challenge or a diagnosis is something that is permanent, that is going to stick with you for the rest of your life, or is it something that can be overcome? And I found what you said earlier in the show, interesting about how you can watch your clients improve just through small changes. And so I find that very interesting. And I'm also going to just caveat this with, we have so many schizophrenic bipolar diagnoses coming down for kids, younger and younger and younger, and it's heartbreaking to see. And so talk to me a little bit more about those challenges that these kids are experiencing. Is this something that we can do anything about, or is it just going to get worse?

Mendi: You're going to have to give me a few minutes for that. Take it. So let's start with the first thing, diagnostics, right? Diagnoses come from the DSM. It's a manual of diagnoses. Diagnoses are not meant to be a label. Diagnoses are meant to be a description of symptoms. So you can say, okay, based off what I'm seeing, here's what it might be, right? Because mental health is fluid and people can get better or worse or adjust. As they adjust, they can shift, okay, well, now there was this cluster of things he was struggling with. Now, this cluster slightly changed, so I'm going to call it this, but the label is not anything more than a description of symptoms so that you can go, okay, here's what I have to tackle.

So when people say, I have this, or I have that, they don't have anything. They have a series of symptoms that is given this label, but those symptoms can change. And so I hate it when people are labeled that way. I know the fear parents have when their kids are giving diagnoses, so they avoid it. I know how the stigma works. And then sometimes you have kids who that becomes their whole brand, I'm depressed, I'm a bipolar. And so their whole identity is formed around that. And so there's no hope after that. This is just what I am. And then there's the other pieces. Well, this is just what I am, so whatever, I'll do what I want. So there are pieces of that. And so people don't tend to realize that this is a description of symptoms, which leads then to the diagnostic errors and challenges is that very often practitioners don't have enough time. So Nevada has a very, very few quality psychiatrists, if any at all.

I know at least one group. There's maybe a second group, but they have very, very few, which means they have very little time. And so when you meet a kid and you talk to them, you have about 15 minutes to get as many of the symptoms as you can, but you don't always get them. And so a lot of times like, okay, well these kind of qualify as maybe this or maybe that. And they throw some medicine at it and they see if it works. So a lot of times when we see things like schizophrenia, which I mentioned as it pertains to pot, it's often misconstrued. It's often a cluster of different symptoms. So for example, schizophrenia may have some explosive behavior. There may be some times where the client seems to be interacting with themselves, where there's what appears to be some kind of mania, some psychosis. But a lot of times when you're dealing with a kid on the spectrum who's struggling socially and may convert with themselves because they struggle, you've completely missed the boat

And you've taken the parental interpretation of it and gone the whole wrong way. I have a client right now whose parents are unfortunately fighting a custody battle, but the dad wanted the kid to be brought to the hospital and forced medication. The kid was fine for eight weeks, no symptoms of mania, no symptoms of any of this, but he had been labeled by prior providers and hospitals and filled with antipsychotics until some point that he refused to take the medication. And all of a sudden, he's fine. Wow, cool. And so it's that kind of thing. Bipolar can be misconstrued with severe depression. What they're saying is mania might not be mania. The kid's just been pent up and he's just letting loose. And so it really is important to recognize that the symptoms drive the overall label, and we miss that. And so when you talk about these new diagnoses, to me, there's always a fad, right? The fad was like a DD, then now everyone's got a D, h, D. Now everyone has Asperger's. Oh, but Asperger's now gone, okay, fine. Now everybody has whatever the next most popular thing is. And for me, that's based off, again, people who don't have enough time serving people who are underserved, not having enough time to look at the diagnostics and going, you know what? I keep hearing about this overall diagnosis. It kind of fits. Just go with it. And the most misconstrued diagnostics are a DHD versus spectrum.

Spectrum kids play into so many different diagnostics and go unnoticed almost to teenagers because they're so smart at mimicking, but they don't actually intuitively understand how social norms work.

And when they become teenagers, the rules change. When you're a kid, teacher's sad, she looks sad. When a kid's upset, they cry. When mom's angry, she shouts, you have to behave to get this, you have to do this to get that. The rules are simple. So as kids, you don't always see misbehaving. You sometimes do, but then they become teenagers when she's crying. She's happy when he says, this is cool. You're not supposed to do that. When my dad says, first he does, when my mom says, it's confusing, it becomes confusing. And so these kids seem very explosive. They're angry, they're frustrated, you're inconsistent. And so they get these, he's like, oh, he's bipolar. He's manic. He's this, he's that. He's so explosive. We can't control him. I'm like, well, let's start with structure. Let's start with basics. Let's start with consistency. So it is very important that parents recognize that their providers may not have enough time. And so it's important for parents to come to the providers with data.

They just don't have data. Here's what I've been seeing for this amount of time. Here's a list of everything I've observed. You can feed your provider data and they have more information to work with. Otherwise, you're sitting across a teenager or kid for 15 minutes. Kid's not going to tell you what they're dealing with, so you're going to grab as much as you can and throw medicine at it, and then it's the wrong medicine. Now the issues are compounded, and then you throw a medicine at that to fix that, and then that to fix that, and that to fix that. And then you have a very disgruntled and thrown off teenager.

Katie: Wow. So that's my five

Mendi: Minutes.

Katie: Interesting. What a good answer. And I mean, I inherently agree with quite a few of statements that you made there. And yeah, thank you so much for just laying that out in a more simple way, to not be a label as an identity, but to be a diagnostic as symptoms. And I just think that's powerful because that gives you power back as the client, as the person who's struggling as the family, the parents.

Mendi: Correct.

Katie: Absolutely.

Well, thank you so much for your time. This was really, really wonderful. And yeah, I want to leave the episode with a few resources for parents or teenagers who may be listening and not sure where to turn. I in particular, I work with NAMI Southern Nevada for mental illness. I love them. They have a teen youth support group that they just started just a couple months ago. They also have a teen text line, so really trying to help out, and then they offer ending the silence presentations for schools. And so really trying to get that education out there. So that's all free resources, but I know there are lots of other resources. So why don't you tell us a little bit more about how people can get in contact with you, maybe other resources that you know about, and if anybody's struggling, how they can reach out.

Mendi: Yeah, I mean, for me, I have a website. It's Mendi baron.com, M-E-N-D-I-B-A-R-O n.com. My company in Las Vegas, which deals with Teen Mental Health is Mariah Behavioral Health. That's M-O-R-I-A-H, behavioral health.com. NAMI's an excellent resource. There are quite a few youth organizations that have opened up in Nevada that have had a lot of success, which I can probably send you a list and you can publish with the episode.

There are some nationwide groups that have been really terrific in California. There was a group, which I don't know if it's spread around, but it's called Billy because I love You, and it's a parent support group primarily around addiction for those who deal with addiction, right? AA is for obviously people struggling with addiction, but Al-Anon is for the families of people struggling with addiction. And so you can meet other people and talk about things. People have been through the same things that you may be going through right now. You ideally should try to reach out to various therapeutic groups in the area. There are quite a few of those in Nevada. And you can reach out to your school and ask for resources. Even if schools don't have their own resources, they tend to have a list of resources, and that can be helpful. And sometimes Google could be your friend, sometimes not. I wouldn't Google symptoms, but I Google providers, and then you can go from there.

Katie: Wonderful. Thank you. That's perfect. That's an excellent list of resources to get people going. And yeah, and I hope that this episode was helpful for everyone out there. I'm just so excited that you were able to come on Mendi, and to talk more about this really important topic. And I just appreciate your time and we'll see everybody next time. We are live every first and third Wednesday of the month here on PR Connections, but you can catch all of our episodes @katierosewaechter.com. Thanks everyone. Have a great one.

Mendi: Take care.