In this genuinely hazardous COVID-19 environment, how can therapists help kids and families reject their OCD safety rituals?

Building a relationship with heavily armored, developmentally regressed, profoundly sad adolescents is no small feat. They don’t exactly let you in the front door.

Learning to surf requires awareness, focus, and flexibility—perhaps the most essential qualities for navigating the complexities of life. For some young clients, the ocean is proving to be a powerful co-therapist.

The process of creating beats and lyrics is rooted in therapeutic practices. At one South Bronx high school, a school social worker has traded the therapy room for the music studio.

Supporting transgender children doesn’t always mean rushing toward medical intervention.

Vulnerability, doubt, fear, and uncertainty—feelings most people try to avoid—are essential to cultivating creativity.

When our kids no longer need us to be problem solvers, what do we become?

In the therapy field, especially, we tend to view self-deception as a path to any number of bad ends, like a sense of failure when reality collides with fantasy, or making ill-begotten choices. Of course, illusions do carry these hazards, and plenty of others! But as science journalist Shankar Vedantam argues in our lead piece, perhaps we need to widen our lens beyond what’s true or not, and ask what function an illusion is serving. What are the consequences? Might there be occasions when the benefits justify the costs?

What if we stopped looking to modify the unique functioning of the teenage brain—delusional though it may be at times—and did more to foster the creative and generative aspects of an adolescent’s alternative worldview?

When it comes to coping with suicide deaths, we therapists need to let go of our superhero expectations and support one another as dedicated, fallible professionals and human beings.