Dr. Paul Kiritsis

Yes, it is treatable through cognitive-behavioral therapy and exposure therapy under the guidance of a mental health professional.

A good place to start is psychoeducation about the child's own warning signs (i.e., sweating, raising voice, feeling sick in the stomach) and anger triggers and/or teaching appropriate coping skills like deep breathing, calling "time out," or going for a walk. A professional can help with implementing intervention programs incorporating many of these elements and illuminating why anger in certain contexts can be self-sabotaging and calamitous.

Greetings, Antidepressants are first line longer-term (more than one week) pharmacotherapy treatment for anxiety and you should remain on them for at least 4-6 weeks to notice any benefit. Most antidepressants have inherent anxiolytic effects. Paul

That would depend entirely on how debilitating the anxiety is, and whether it stops you from doing what you love to do. Does it impair you vocationally or in the context of connection and interpersonal relationships? If this is the case, then it might be worth consulting with a psychiatrist or a psychologist.

Greetings, Mindfulness-based interventions like keeping conscious awareness anchored to the present moment will probably be of immense help to you. A therapist trained in the third wave behavioral therapies can help in identifying efficacious mindfulness techniques and implementing them. Paul

Greetings, You'd probably have to opt for a family systems approach (i.e., parent management therapy) which trains parents/caregivers how to deal with recalcitrance and oppositional defiance in children. A friend of mine works at the Parent Management Training Institute ( www.parentmanagementtraininginstitute.com) which has some excellent programs you could enrol in. PMT should be accompanied with individual child therapy incorporating CBT or DBT interventions to disproportionately alter the ratio of negative and positive behaviors in favor of the latter. Good luck! Paul

Greetings, The answer to that question is a resounding yes! Psychologists can address both the cognitive deficits (i.e., reduced cognitive flexibility, working memory capacity) that are common with this neuropsychiatric disorder as well as the emotional sequelae associated with the experience of auditory verbal or multimodal hallucinations. They also have a plethora of tools to address idiosyncratic delusional experience.

Greetings,

You probably need a more formal neuropsychiatric evaluation with psychological testing to parse out the differential diagnosis and determine the appropriate pharmacological and nonpharmacological interventions. Do you have a provider you could approach for this purpose? Where are you located?

There are many different approaches to treating aggression in children. You could take a behaviorist/operant conditioning approach and opt for *negative punishment*, meaning that each time your child transgresses you remove an existing reward or something they find intrinsically pleasurable or meaningful (i.e., a favorite game, toy, or activity). You could also model a more appropriate response or reaction (if the aggressive behavior happens under specific consequences) and explain why their behavior is inappropriate, and then proceed to reinforce the new behavior by offering a reward each time they demonstrate it (i.e., “I’ll add $1 to your weekly allowance each time you act this way instead of this way”). This is called *positive reinforcement*. Possibly the most effective method of mitigating aggressive behavior might be through psychoeducation; you help your child identify the emotion they’re feeling, recognize triggers, and help them understand the correlation between the negative consequences and the emotion that precipitated it. I have some worksheets you can use if you wish to utilize this approach. Feel free to email me. Hope this helps!

Greetings, Thank you for writing! I can definitely give you some useful tips and pointers but you need to tell me the exact nature of the problem. What kind of behavioral issues does she have?