What's Wrong With My Teen? Finding Answers to Teenage Addiction and Family Crisis

A debut guide focuses on counseling troubled teens.

“Have you noticed that when someone is dealing with an addiction or mental health condition,” asks Raphael in her book, “we don’t always support them the same way as someone with a physical illness?” Approaching addiction as though it were a physical illness, she takes readers through both her own experiences dealing with alcohol and a variety of scenarios that might involve teens facing substance abuse or even suicidal thoughts or intentions. She seeks to clarify for parents and caregivers in such situations that they might be complicating matters by “accepting undue responsibility” and stresses “your happiness is separate from your teen’s success or your teen’s struggle.” This may be intensely puzzling for parents who cannot be happy while their teen is suffering, but Raphael moves on, offering reviews of each chapter’s key points, journaling exercises, and sample letters and scripts for caregivers at a loss for what to say. Preparation as a key to handling crises is a theme running throughout the book. In all cases, the ethos of helping the troubled person is paramount. “If your teen were willing to take this kind of action, they likely would have done it already,” Raphael points out. The author writes with forceful, direct honesty about both her own situation and the realities facing the parents and caregivers of troubled teens. Readers with their own views on the subject should be aware going in that Raphael sees addiction purely as a disease, something that happens to a person rather than something that a person does. “I had an abnormal response to refined sugar, and ingesting it caused me to want more,” she writes about her own experiences. Nowhere in this account or any other that she provides is there the notion of self-control, and readers must abandon such thoughts if they’re going to get the most out of Raphael’s advice. That counsel is uniformly smart and compassionate, offering a wide array of useful tools to aid the afflicted.

A thoughtful, worthwhile series of measures for helping teens deal with addiction.