Teen and Adolescent Therapy in Northbrook
Adolescents are not small adults, and the therapy that works for them does not look like the therapy that works for their parents. Fifteen of our clinicians work with this age group.
Most parents who call us about a teenager have been watching something for months. Grades that slid and did not come back. A child who used to talk and now closes a door. Friendships that thinned out over a term. Sunday nights that have started to go badly. None of that is a diagnosis, and it is often not an emergency — but it is the point at which an outside adult becomes useful, because by then the conversation at home has usually worn a groove.
The first appointment is mostly listening, and a good deal of it is spent working out what kind of problem this is. Low mood and burnout look alike from the outside. So do social anxiety and a thinning friendship group. So do attention problems and a teenager who is quietly overwhelmed. Treating the wrong one is the usual reason therapy stalls, which is why we would rather spend the first session or two getting that right than start fast in the wrong direction.
Our Northbrook office is on Academy Drive, and the families who use it mostly come from Northbrook itself, Glenview, Deerfield, Northfield, Winnetka, Glencoe, Highland Park and Wheeling. Teen counseling and therapy for tweens are offered here in person and by telehealth across Cook County.
What parents usually describe
- School refusal, or mornings that have become a daily negotiation
- Academic pressure that has stopped being motivating and started being corrosive
- Social anxiety — a teenager who manages school and then cannot manage the party
- Withdrawal from friends, sport or activities they used to want to do
- Irritability at home that is out of proportion to what set it off
- Sleep that has inverted, and a phone that is now part of the problem
- A family change — separation, a move, a bereavement, a sibling in difficulty
How we work with this age group
With teenagers the working relationship is the mechanism, not the preliminary. A fifteen-year-old who has been sent will decide in the first twenty minutes whether this is another adult managing them, and very little useful happens after that decision goes the wrong way. So the early sessions are deliberately unhurried.
The methods are ordinary and well evidenced. CBT for anxious thinking and avoidance, which eleven of our clinicians work in. DBT skills — distress tolerance, emotion regulation — where feelings arrive faster than they can be handled, which eight work in. Family systems work where the difficulty is sitting between people rather than inside one of them, which six work in.
Parents are kept in the picture without the room being reported back to them verbatim. What that balance looks like is agreed openly at the start, with the teenager present, because a confidentiality arrangement that has not been explained is one a teenager will assume the worst about.
Getting to the Northbrook office
We are at 604 Academy Drive, a few minutes from downtown Northbrook and close to Northbrook Court and the Willow Festival shopping centre. There is a car park on site and no charge for it.
Appointments after school fill first, which is worth knowing when you call: the 4pm and 5pm slots go earliest in the week. Where getting across town after school is the obstacle rather than the appointment itself, sessions can run by secure telehealth anywhere in Illinois.
604 Academy Drive, Northbrook, IL 60062 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
Often not in the first session, and that is expected rather than a failure. Early appointments with a reluctant teenager are mostly about establishing that the room is not an extension of the argument at home. Most become willing once they have worked out that nothing they say is going to be relayed straight back.
Enough to parent, not a transcript. We set that out explicitly in the first appointment with your teenager in the room, and we say plainly what would always be shared — anything bearing on their safety. Teenagers test that boundary early, and a vague answer is the thing that loses them.
Both. Twelve of our clinicians work with children as well as teenagers, and the approach shifts considerably with age — more play and more parent work lower down, more direct work with the young person as they get older.
Most new clients are seen within one to two weeks. If a particular time of day is essential, say so when you call — that is usually what determines the wait rather than availability in general.
Read more about this service
This page covers teen & adolescent therapy at our Northbrook office. For the clinical detail — what the work involves, who it suits and how it is structured — see Child & Teen Therapy →
