Sarah LaTessPhD, Licensed Clinical Psychologist

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.

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.

Refers relationship issues with a partner or spouse. Can include issues related to relationship distress, relationship satisfaction, communication, intimacy, etc.

Self-esteem is the degree to which a person feels confident, valuable, and worthy of respect. Feeling low self-esteem can influence overall well-being and be linked to anxiety and/or depression.

Positive and negative change can be difficult, including things like moving, breaking up, adjusting to parenthood, or changing careers. It’s normal to feel stressed, however, life transitions can inhibit people from living healthy lifestyles.

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.

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.

It's normal to experience anger at times, but for some, it becomes so frequent, intense, or difficult to control that it negatively affects their life. Anger management is a structured therapeutic approach toward reducing one’s anger to a point where more appropriate coping and/or conflict management skills are used. Beliefs and thoughts leading toward anger outbursts are explored while healthy coping and interpersonal skills are put into practice.

Antisocial personality entails a complete disregard for others. Accordingly, such individuals may break laws, lie, cheat, steal, and even harm others. Signs may present during childhood, but this diagnosis cannot be made until adolescence or adulthood. This disorder oftentimes develops as a response to childhood trauma and parental/guardian behavioral modeling.

Children that experience parents and/or guardians that are avoidant, ambivalent, or resistant from an early age, may develop attachment issues. This can manifest as difficulty forming or maintaining friendships, romantic relationships and empathetic bonds throughout life, as well as other issues.