Introduction

Most of us who have a daughter have a daughter we want to heal. This book attempts to assist with that desire. It is intended to address your teenage daughter s mental health needs, whether your daughter is thirteen or nineteen years old, or even older. I hope that the information, exercises, and inspiration provided will empower you to help not only her, but also yourself.

This is not an academic book. This brief book is intended to be a ten-thousand-foot overview of the new field of Lifestyle Psychiatry, as well as a guide to navigating it. It is offered in order to fill an insatiable need that I see in many of the parents of my primarily female patients: I want to help her, but I don t know how.

Even if you are an academic or professional, what you probably need is not a treatise on the benefits of the Whole Food Plant Based diet, or whatever other lifestyle intervention might be under consideration, but instead a practical, compelling, and comprehensive guide to healing your daughter who given that you picked up this book is likely struggling with depression. It is intended to provide a map, a skillset, and a toolkit for you and her together to terraform her psychological landscape into one in which she can grow and flourish.

Importantly, these ideas and information are invitational only. There will be no attempt here to convince nor to persuade either you or your daughter. I will just provide the facts as my training and experience have led me to see them.

An essential fact that needs to be acknowledged here is that, no matter what you do, nor how diligently you do it, nor how cleverly you do it, you actually cannot heal your daughter. She must heal herself if she is to heal at all. But what you can do is to provide a setting, a milieu, an ambiance, in which her self-healing might become easier, and then offer her a companion in the doing. You can help her to heal herself.

The good news is that healing, even from the worst disasters of childhood and early adolescence, is possible. The early traumas that life inflicts need not be managed with ever-escalating doses of psychiatric medications; I believe that they actually can be healed completely or almost completely healed. There is every reason for hope.

In this chapter, I will describe the problems addressed in this book depression, cutting, and suicidal thoughts; introduce and describe the new fields of Lifestyle Medicine and Lifestyle Psychiatry