Dr. Stephen Wieder is a child and adolescent psychiatrist in both private and consultative practice in Newburyport, MA, and has this advice for working with families of adolescents: “By the time they come to see me, as a rule, things with the child are pretty acute, the family feels helpless, and all they can see is bleakness. As a clinician, you ask yourself, ‘how am I going to unravel this?’ I do a number of things. First, I let them know that I’ve been here before, and I offer them hope. I also acknowledge how difficult the process has been for the parents, largely by going through the history and reflecting back how much effort they’ve put into helping their child. I present myself as their collaborator, and we work together on a process of diagnosing the problem and working on a treatment plan.”