Teen and Adolescent Therapy in Libertyville
Our Libertyville office draws teenagers from across Lake County. Fifteen of our clinicians work with this age group, in person on Hollister Drive or by telehealth.
Adolescence is the stage at which the people who know a young person best often become the least able to reach them, and that is not a failure of parenting — it is more or less the developmental task. An outside adult with no history in the house and no stake in who was right last Thursday can sometimes get further in six weeks than a parent can in six months.
What brings families here varies, but the shape repeats. Something changed; it has not changed back; and the usual repairs have stopped working. Sometimes there is an obvious event behind it and sometimes there is not, and the absence of one is not evidence that nothing is wrong.
Lake County families travel further to appointments than North Shore ones do, and we plan around that rather than ignoring it. The office is in Hawthorn Health Center at 1800 Hollister Drive, and families reach it from Mundelein, Vernon Hills, Grayslake, Gurnee, Round Lake, Lake Forest, Lake Bluff, Lincolnshire and Buffalo Grove. Teen counseling and therapy for tweens run from this office in person and by telehealth.
When families get in touch
- A teenager who has gone quiet, and whose answers have shortened to one word
- Anxiety that has started to decide things — which events are attended, which are not
- Mornings that have become the hardest part of the day
- A drop in schoolwork that nobody can trace to a single cause
- Anger that arrives faster and larger than the situation warrants
- Worry about a friendship group, or about what is happening online
- A separation, a bereavement or a move that the household has absorbed and the teenager has not
What the work looks like
We start by working out what is actually going on, which takes longer than a questionnaire and is the part that determines whether anything that follows helps. Anxiety, low mood, attention difficulty and ordinary adolescent upheaval overlap heavily at this age, and they do not respond to the same treatment.
From there the approaches are the well-established ones: CBT where avoidance and anxious prediction are driving things, DBT skills where emotional intensity is the problem to be managed, and family work where the difficulty genuinely sits between people. Several of our clinicians also use play and expressive approaches with younger adolescents who do not do their best thinking in conversation.
Where a young person is also struggling academically and nobody is sure why, our psychological and ADHD testing sits in the same practice — so the assessment and the therapy do not require starting again somewhere else with a new waiting list.
Getting to the Libertyville office
Suite 201, Hawthorn Health Center, 1800 Hollister Drive. There is parking directly outside, and the building is shared with other medical practices — give the suite number at the entrance.
The Libertyville Metra station is a short drive, which matters for older teenagers who travel to appointments independently. Cook Park and the Libertyville Sports Complex are both nearby landmarks if you are navigating by them rather than by address.
Telehealth is available anywhere in Illinois, which is often the practical answer for families coming from Zion, Fox Lake or the north of the county in winter.
1800 Hollister Drive, Suite 201, Libertyville, IL 60048 on Google Maps →
Insurance, including Medicare
We are in-network with most major plans — Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, Aetna, Medicare, Medicare Advantage, Evernorth (Cigna), UnitedHealthcare, BCBS Community Medicaid, Oscar — including Medicare and Medicare Advantage. Our Intake Team verifies your benefits and tells you your cost before the first appointment. See the full list →
Common questions
The catchment is wide — regularly from Mundelein, Vernon Hills, Grayslake, Gurnee, Lake Forest and Lincolnshire, and from further north in the county. Where the journey itself is the obstacle, some families do alternate sessions by telehealth.
Older teenagers often do, and some travel in independently. Consent and billing still involve a parent or guardian, and we talk through how the first appointment will run before anyone arrives.
After-school and early-evening slots exist and are the first to fill. Tell us what you need when you call rather than accepting the first offer — the wait is usually about time of day, not about availability overall.
It is in the same practice. Psychological and ADHD evaluation is offered here, so if the therapist and the family conclude that a formal assessment would answer more than another term of therapy, that does not mean starting again elsewhere.
Read more about this service
This page covers teen & adolescent therapy at our Libertyville office. For the clinical detail — what the work involves, who it suits and how it is structured — see Child & Teen Therapy →
