Teen therapy groups

[eaglefanrb11]

Hello:
My wife and I are dealing with our 19 year old daughter who has suffered all of her life with mental illness.  We have been involved with several counselors, therapists, and psychologists.  Most of her life we have treated her for ADHD & depression but just recently it was brought to our attention that she maybe bipolar or dealing with borderline personality disorder.  A lot of her actions, moods, and symptoms point in this direction but she refuses to see a psychiatrist for meds and therapy.  We were wondering if anyone knew of support groups for teens where they discuss their feelings and actions as a group?  We attended a grief therapy session that was structured this way and she opened up and talked a lot with the other teens.  Thank you

Our objective is to better understand the struggles our child faces and to learn the skills to improve our relationship and provide a supportive environment and also improve on our own emotional responses, attitudes and effectiveness as a family leaders

[mendingway26]

Your grief-group observation is the most useful data point you have: she opened up when the format was peers talking to peers, and stayed shut with experts evaluating her. After a childhood of being "treated," that's not defiance — it's self-protection. One more professional telling her what's wrong with her reads as one more verdict; a group makes her a participant instead of a patient.

A few directions worth knowing about:

DBT skills groups for teens and young adults (DBT-A) are the best-studied group format for exactly this profile — mood swings, impulsivity, emotion dysregulation. Many programs run a parallel multi-family group where parents learn the same skills. That structure matters: it signals "we're all working on this," rather than "she's the identified patient."

NAMI's Family-to-Family program is free and built for parents in your position — not for her, for you both. Long waitlists for the young person often move faster once parents are in the system and known to the providers.

If she's in college, campus counseling centers usually offer groups at no extra cost, and "free" sometimes lowers the barrier that "therapy" raises.

One caution from families who've walked this: at 19 you can't compel care, only invite it. The invitation lands best when it's small ("try one group meeting") and framed around something she wants — less overwhelm, better friendships, sleep — rather than a diagnosis. It took our family several rounds of that to learn the difference.