Psychiatric Services to Help Better Your Child’s Mental Health

Good mental health is significant for your child. With treatments and support services, your child can achieve mental calmness. Such services boost your child’s confidence, help them overcome fears, and develop healthy behaviors.

When receiving treatments in Richardson, TX, our specialists ensure that your kid has the least restrictive environment. Therefore, they will try to create an environment that is conducive to your child by replicating home and community-based set-ups.

As a parent, it is advisable to discuss details of your child’s behaviors and phobias. Also, at Texas Psychiatry Associates, you can ask questions and let the treatment team know when you feel a particular treatment won’t work on your child.

When to Seek Pediatric Psychiatry Services

Children display signs of mental disorders, depending on some factors such as social interactions, gender, and age. However, you should consult a pediatric psychiatry specialist when you see the following signs on your child:

• Withdrawal from activities that initially brought happiness
• Feeling sad or withdrawn for more than a week
• Conversations on self-harm
• Involvement in violence or attempts to hurting others
• Anxiety attacks
• Loss of appetite
• Severe mood swings
• Drastic changes in their personalities
• Continuous drug and substance abuse, especially among teenagers

These warning signs can make you worry about your child. However, immediate action would be the best solution to save your child from mental damage.

Services That Help Better Your Childs Mental Health

Some of the services you can get in a pediatric psychiatry hospital or facility include:

Assessments

Psychiatry assessments for children involve several tests. The tests include overall health assessments, psychiatric, neurological, and vocational evaluation. Your psychiatrist carries out the mental health evaluations to check your child’s functioning across all environments.

Behavioral Therapy

Behavioral therapy focuses on your child’s behaviors and what triggers them. When providing behavioral treatments, your specialist aims to reinforce good behaviors and eliminate the harmful ones.

Your behavioral therapist uses rewards and consequences during the process. For each good behavior, there is a reward, and each bad one, there are consequences. During the process, your behavioral therapist would want to work in an environment familiar to your child. Your family can also be present to help implement the rewards and consequences system.

Counseling

Individual or sometimes group counseling with your specialist can help your child cope with the challenges they face in their lives. Apart from learning how to cope with challenges, counseling can help in boosting their self-confidence, improving their social skills, manage anger and anxiety as well as develop positive life skills.

Psychopharmacological Services

Some mental conditions require drug therapy. If your child has mental conditions such as schizophrenia or depression, your specialist can prescribe some medications. The physician will then advise you on what to do after your child takes the medications since some can cause drowsiness.

Also, the physician will schedule appointments to refill the drugs since the treatments take long.

Exposure Therapy

When your child has phobias, exposure therapy would be the best treatment option for them. Exposure therapy involves exposing your kid to situations that cause fear and anxiety and help them lower the levels of distress when they encounter such situations.

During the procedure, the therapist will expose the child to situations, feelings, memories, and things that make them anxious. The specialist will then talk to your child about the fear, support them, and teach them how to deal with the phobias. One technique of dealing with anxiety is by breathing deeply.

Emergency Services

Your child can experience a mental health emergency. Emergencies can include when your child can not calm down, uncontrollable, or in danger of hurting themselves. In such cases, we can send a mobile crisis team to help. If your child threatens to hurt themselves, you can call  National Suicide Prevention Hotline or 911.

Group Therapy

Group therapy involves people facing the same challenges meeting regularly to talk and discuss their issues under moderation. The group therapy option aims to create an environment for children with mental health issues to talk and make suggestions on how to cope with the problems.

Those with problems of making friends can benefit from social interactions in group therapy programs. Also, the therapist or moderator can invite a person who has overcome a mental health issue to mentor the children.