Mental Health: Why Is My Teen So Anxious, Depressed, Angry Or Silent? Episodes

Ask Rachel anything Are smartphones and social media really damaging our teenagers’ mental health – or are we looking in the wrong place? In this episode, Rachel Richards talks with Professor Candice Odgers, a leading expert on adolescent mental health in the digital age, to unpack what decades of research actually show about teens, tech and wellbeing. We explore why today’s teenagers are doing better than many headlines suggest, the real size of the link between phones, social media, anxiety...

Ask Rachel anything If your teenage daughter says, “I have anxiety,” “my ADHD was out of control today,” or calls a friend “toxic,” it can feel both strangely sophisticated and oddly shallow at the same time. She has language. She has labels. But somehow, you’re still not sure what’s really going on inside her. In this episode with psychiatrist Dr Suzanne Garfinkel-Crowell, author of Girlhood Translated: Understanding Girls in the Age of Therapy Speak and Self-Diagnosis, we pulled back the cu...

Ask Rachel anything So many parents come to me saying 'My teen has no friends. What should I do?' and I can't help wondering if we are missing one of the most important ways to help them. Being good at friendships ourselves. Think about it. If we're not good at making and maintaining friends ourselves, who will our babies learn their friendship skills from? In this episode of Teenagers Untangled, I’m joined by author, broadcaster, and founder of The Friendship Lab, Sheridan Voysey, to unpack ...

Ask Rachel anything A listener parenting a teen son wrote to say both of them felt pretty stunned when he was rejected from the university he'd set his heart on. She asked for the best way to help our teenagers cope with this sort of disappointment. I thought it was a great question and a good opportunity to also look at how we parents can best navigate when our teen has worked for years toward a dream - a top university place, exam results, a team, a part - and it doesn’t happen. The d...