Health Matters with TSET: A Psychiatrist Talks about Mental Health

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. In today’s Health Matters with TSET, Amy Slanchik sits down with a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist at Parkside Psychiatric Hospital & Clinic to ask a few questions.

AMY: Dr. Sharp, what is the number one issue you and your colleagues here at Parkside see every day, and what are you doing to combat it?

Dr. Matthew Sharp, Parkside Director of Medical Education: “I would say that the number one thing that we struggle with, and that our kids struggle with, is feelings of anxiety and depression. This most likely happens in adolescence and teenage years, because that's when we hit puberty and our adult brain kicks on. And so how we work and combat those things is we use a combination of medication and therapy, or just even therapy alone, where the medication can help ease our symptoms so we can participate in the therapeutic aspect of it, where all anxiety and depression has cognitive lies, where we tell ourselves things that are not true. We learn how to combat that. And then another part of therapy, too, is a behavioral aspect, where we learn to start to do more positive behaviors like walking, meditating [and] being more social with people that we care about.

AMY: The American Psychiatric Association says adults are feeling more and more anxious, year after year. Are you seeing that here at Parkside and what tools can you give people to help address that?

Dr. Sharp: “We see lots of that. We do focus on more, like, youth, and not as much as the adult population. We do go up to age 30. But, we do live in a more stressful world and a more stressful society. So we try to work with those adults, again, that still have those same cognitive concerns to be more present, to be more living in the moment, and not have so many thoughts about the past or the future, that we can't change.”

AMY: May is Mental Health Awareness Month. What's your message to Oklahomans?

Dr. Sharp: “That all of us have anxiety and depression. All of us have mental health. It may not be at the level that you need professional help, but we all have feelings and we can all share and work with each other to lean on those things. Because at the end of the day we are social, emotional creatures. And there's no such thing as a self-made man. No such thing as an independent person. We are always interdependent on our interpersonal relationships.”