College Parenting on Summer Break

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Final exams are coming, and shortly afterward, college kids will be coming back home for the summer break.

Students come home soon for summer break, and if it’s your first summer after your student left the nest, you may be wondering what to expect.

1.     Exhaustion is normal for a few days after final exams. Many students have been studying day and night for weeks. It’s not unusual to crash out for a few days.

2.     Don’t expect the teenager who left in the fall to come home a full-fledged adult by the first summer. Kids will revert to their default settings in their parents home. Realistically, your child is probably going to lie around and watch TV or play video games.

3.     If you’re expecting productive behavior over the summer, make it clear from the beginning. Do you want your student to get a job, or help out around the house? Don’t think he’ll do those things automatically. Make it clear what you expect from the get go.

4.     You’ll be annoyed. You’ve been missing your kid all year, and looking forward to having him home for the summer. But it won’t be all sunshine and roses. Expect to feel ignored, disrespected, and even used. Let go of your perfect images, and expect misunderstandings and growth opportunities as you cross this new threshold.

5.     You’re on the road to separation, but you aren’t there yet. If your student is still spending summers at home, she’s not grown and gone from the nest yet. She is still a kid in many ways. You have more ground to cover before she’s actually on her own.

Posted on April 30, 2018 by Melissa Deuter.

Is It Useful To Ground A Twenty-Year-Old?

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“Is it useful to ground a twenty-year-old?”

This is the question that came up while talking with a Dad this week. He has a now twenty-year-old daughter living in his house, and she doesn’t do anything he asks of her.

We’re not talking about your average defiant kid, though. In fact, she is respectful and sweet. She just doesn’t get things done. The problem is chronic overwhelm, not laziness or disregard for the rules. Whether it’s filling out paperwork, or washing laundry, tasks aren’t completed when they need to be.

She stopped functioning due to legitimate symptoms of depression and anxiety that hit during formative years. But there’s no getting up and getting moving now that symptoms have leveled off. She doesn’t even know how to get moving. She never learned the basics of how to make herself take care of daily responsibilities when she was unmotivated or uninterested. Being sick got in the way of important life lessons. For a while, it was a true crisis and everything was on hold.

“Now that she’s an adult, I’m not sure what to do,” he said. “I was thinking I should take her phone and teach her a lesson about acting like a grown up.”

I asked him if he heard the incongruence between his intent (to have her behave like an adult) and his planned intervention (to punish her like a child).

“Well what else can I do?” he asked.

Suddenly he finds himself trying to “ground” his adult daughter, and it is immediately clear that this isn’t going to work.

The problem with grounding a twenty-year-old is that it communicates that the parent is the adult, and the twenty is expected to be a good child. Grounding fails because being a submissive child isn’t working anymore. She needs to own up to her responsibilities like an adult.

So what’s the answer if grounding isn’t going to work?

The world around won’t her ground her and won’t try to teach her a lesson, but the lessons will come. Those who don’t follow the rules face the consequences.

“Can you imagine this situation with someone other than your daughter? A family friend moves in, and he’s lying in bed in a dirty bedroom, not doing his laundry. What do you do then?” I ask.

He says, “I send him back to his parents, because I’m not going to put up with that. But it’s different. This is my kid. I’m stuck with her.”

“Are you stuck with her?” I ask. “Maybe she needs to be the one who is left holding the responsibility for herself. Maybe it shouldn’t be you who is stuck with the responsibility, but her.”

He has a long way to go still, but this got him thinking. I don’t think he’ll ground her after all.

Posted on April 23, 2018 by Melissa Deuter.

The Questions Everybody Wants To Ask About Mental Health Urgent Care Clinic

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A few days ago, I attended a mental health care conference along with a crowd of other mental health care professionals. Having come from another event, I was wearing a T-shirt with the logo for Sigma Mental Health Urgent Care on the front. I got a few funny looks. I wondered if I had a piece of broccoli stuck between my teeth. Then people started asking me about my t-shirt and the clinic, Sigma Mental Health Urgent Care. People were puzzling because they were just trying to get their minds around the idea of mental health urgent care. Even my mental health colleagues don’t quite grasp it at first.

Here are some of the things people ask:

Mental health urgent care clinic? Yes. We provide walk-in mental health services.
 

So is it emergency room? Is it a hospital? No it’s not hospital, and no it’s not an emergency room. Just like a medical urgent care is not a hospital and not emergency room, neither are we. An emergency room is designed to take care of people with life-threatening emergencies, like heart attacks, while medical urgent care clinic is for minor immediate care needs, like a sports injury.

In the same way, a psychiatric emergency, like an immediate urge to attempt suicide, often requires hospitalization, while an urgent care level problem would be the inability to wait 2 to 6 months to get help because of the backlog in the mental healthcare system.

Emergency versus urgent can be confusing. The funny thing is that the patients who need our services understand what we do intuitively. They are never confused about what we do.


I see all the stuff online about how you like to treat teenagers and young adults. Are those the only people you treat at this urgent care clinic? I do enjoy seeing teenagers and young adults, and that’s what I often write about on my blog and in my book STUCK in the Sick Role. But at Sigma, we see people of all ages. My writing centers around mental health care topics that I think require more discussion. Specifically, I think the education people receive about their mental health condition at the time of their first diagnosis can alter the course of their illness and even the course of their lives. And since most people first seek care for a mental health problem in their teen or young adult years, I’m often writing about that time of life.


Oh, so do you have somebody there who treats high blood pressure and broken bones at this “urgent care clinic?” Nope. We only do mental health. It’s right there in the name.
 

How can you be an urgent care if you only do mental health? Urgent care means walk-in clinic. The mental health part indicates that that’s all we do.


Are people only allowed to come one time? What do they do after that? Many patients come to Sigma for a series of sessions. They may come for one month for short-term stabilization, or sometimes it’s a six-month period while waiting to get in with a psychiatrist in the community.


I bet you hand out a lot of Xanax, right? No again. We don’t hand out addictive medications at Sigma.


So when people come to your clinic, do they just see a therapist, or what? When people come to Sigma, they are evaluated from a psychological perspective and medical perspective. That means everyone is assessed by a prescribing medical professional who specializes in mental health. Often our therapists participate in the assessment process, but patients don’t “just see a therapist.“


Don’t people have to bond with you for a long time to be your psychiatric patient? How can that be a temporary thing? A trusting long-term treatment relationship is often an important part of mental health care. However, people who come to see us are often desperate for any help. Many simply want to refill of their antidepressant and can’t find a clinic to renew it.


Are the patients violent? Are you scared of them? Goodness no. We have never had anyone in our clinic that was violent or scary. I think that this idea comes from discrimination against people with mental health conditions, and maybe also from the idea that we operate like a mental health emergency room.


Are patients brought to you by police? No, we don’t accept patients from police. If someone is taken into police custody and then transported for mental health evaluation, that care takes place in a mental health emergency room associated with a hospital. Our patients are help-seeking people who come to us by choice. No handcuffs involved.

Have other burning questions? Post them in the comments.

 

Posted on April 16, 2018 by Melissa Deuter.