Ten Commandments for Understanding and Promoting Adolescent Mental Health

During adolescence, the brain undergoes a structural reorganization that provides it with new circuits and connections, which will later support the entire analytical thinking process characteristic of adulthood. Brain circuits are shaped by life experiences, education, stimulation, and environmental support . Thanks to this complex system, we can explore our surroundings while simultaneously enriching them. Ultimately, everything that stimulates our brain also nourishes it.

Maintaining good nutritional status through a healthy, varied, and balanced diet, leading a healthy lifestyle by taking care of our physical and mental health, practicing regular physical exercise, and maintaining good quality and quantity of sleep is of fundamental importance for cognitive and behavioral processes to develop normally.

Adolescence is an extraordinary time, a period of integration of brain changes that, along with environmental factors, will prepare a child for adulthood . Establishing a trusting, empathetic, participatory, and assertive family and educational environment, one that is open to negotiation, embraces all these experiences, and reflects them, will allow the child to acquire the necessary skills to navigate adult life.

Ten Commandments for Understanding and Promoting Adolescent Mental Health

1. Understanding that the brain is changing: during adolescence, brain circuits are restructured. New connections are formed, and others disappear.
2. Modeling family and environment: brain circuits are shaped by life experiences, education, stimulation, and environmental support received.
3. Embrace the challenge: take advantage of this unique time, full of changes, where the opportunity will arise to learn the skills necessary to face adult life.
4. Promoting a healthy life: maintaining good nutritional status, a healthy lifestyle, practicing regular physical exercise, and good quality and quantity of sleep is fundamental for the proper normal development of cognitive and behavioral processes.
5. Managing ICT: leading by example. Not prohibiting, but setting limits. Training them and helping them acquire the appropriate social skills.
6. Communicating with quality: communication changes, having a style based on active listening, availability, flexibility, empathy and acceptance and, finally, assertiveness and self-regulation will be key in the socio-emotional development of the adolescent.
7. Negotiating: conflict management based on positive resolution will be most beneficial for promoting mental health and establishing healthier parent-child relationships.
8. Ask for help: the appearance of symptoms with considerable intensity and duration, decreased performance, a marked change in behavior, will be indicators to request a consultation with a specialist.
9. To accompany: in successes and in mistakes. In managing difficulties and the disorder when it appears.
10. Create a network: parents, academic centers and specialists, communicate, walk together in dialogue to facilitate the transition to adulthood for adolescents with mental health problems - or without.

This is an original article from the Health School of the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu Barcelona.   For more information on family communication, consult the   12th FAROS Report "A look at the mental health of adolescents - Keys to understanding and supporting them."