Valencia Gantt-BanksLMHC

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.

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.

Distress stems from a subjective perception of something being unwanted, undesirable, or detrimental to your wellbeing. Excessive stress significantly impairs mental and physical health and is associated with many diseases and conditions.

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.

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.

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.

Social anxiety or social phobia is fear of social situations or a fear of interacting with people other than close friends and family. Social anxiety can be persistent, intense, and debilitating, greatly affecting daily life.

Regular involvement with a substance or activity in a compulsive, hard to control way that often has harmful consequences. Often refers to substance use, but can include compulsive behaviors such as sex, gambling, or shopping.

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.