Brittany Lewis

Anxiety can mean nervousness, worry, or self-doubt. Anxiety disorder is a mental health disorder that entails excessive, repeated bouts of worry, anxiety, and/or fear.

Abuse includes any significant mistreatment along the lines of psychical, emotional, sexual, verbal, and neglect. Survivors of abuse may experience negative thoughts and feelings, flashbacks, distrust of others, social withdrawal, self-harm, and increased likelihood of developing mental health and substance abuse issues.

Trauma is the result of experiencing a perceived, extremely distressful event. Although the stress threshold for each person differs, meaning that each person considers and experiences trauma differently, it is an event that tops one’s threshold. It exceeds one’s ability to cope or emotionally process. Symptoms may include shock, anxiety, confusion, hopelessness, feeling disconnected, mood swings, nightmares, and intrusive thoughts.

Women’s health is regarded as the holistic being and experience of being female. This extends beyond consideration for illness and other complex conditions but to general considerations of physical, cognitive, social, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Issues may include female oppression, socialized gender role, female reproductive issues, motherhood, body image, divorce, and substance use.

Coping skills are tools and techniques one can learn, practice, and use to handle difficult emotions, decrease stress, and establish or maintain a sense of internal order.

Depression often causes people to feel sad, empty, or hopeless, and can cause a lack of interest in life. It can also affect a person's thinking patterns and physical health.

Concerns that impact school performance or academic life. Can include perfectionism, bullying, financial stress, academic transitions, test anxiety, balancing school with other responsibilities, discrimination, or harassment.

ADHD (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) causes a hard time focusing attention and controlling restless or impulsive behavior. People with ADHD might have emotional outbursts, be forgetful, and/or find it difficult to stay organized.

Adolescent mental health focuses on adolescent-specific experiences including physical and cognitive development, social and environmental factors, sex, sexual identification and orientation, emotional processing, and substance use. Given the influence that parents/guardians have on adolescents, home life is a particularly important consideration.

Adoption and foster care considerations include education on the process, integrating the new family, establishing household rules and boundaries, processing past trauma on behalf of the child, emotional health, and other adjustment procedures.