Adolescent Psychiatry - Krasner Institute

When a teenager is struggling, something is happening inside their whole world.

Not just in their mind, but in their family, their school, their friendships, and who they are becoming.

At the Krasner Institute, we start by understanding who your teenager is developmentally, relationally, and in the full context of their life. Because that understanding is what makes treatment actually work.

Adolescence is the most complicated period in human development.

We are trained to see what is actually happening.

Teenagers are reorganizing almost everything at once: their sense of self, their relationships with their family, their place among peers, their relationship with their own body, their academic identity, and their vision of who they are becoming.

Add a psychiatric condition to that picture — depression, anxiety, OCD, trauma, ADHD, or something harder to name — and the clinical reality becomes genuinely complex.

What looks like defiance may be dysregulation. What looks like laziness may be depression. What looks like a bad attitude may be a teenager who has been misunderstood for years and is protecting themselves the only way they know how.

A process built around your teenager, not a diagnosis.

Most families arrive having tried to piece together care from separate providers — a prescriber here, a therapist there, a school evaluation somewhere else. No one holds the whole picture. The Krasner Institute is built differently. Assessment, treatment, and planning are a single continuous process, organized around one formulation and held together by one coordinated team.

Assessment

The assessment that produces a real answer

Our adolescent assessment is not a one-session evaluation. It is a structured, multi-week process designed to produce a complete clinical picture — not just a diagnosis. We identify how your teenager arrived at this point and what it will actually take to help them.

Before we meet, we use our intake platform, Chapter by PsychNow, to gather developmental history, prior records, and a detailed picture of your teenager’s life — from sleep and school to relationships, identity, and everything in between. This information shapes the clinical sessions that follow.
Before we meet, we use our intake platform, Chapter by PsychNow, to gather developmental history, prior records, and a detailed picture of your teenager’s life — from sleep and school to relationships, identity, and everything in between. This information shapes the clinical sessions that follow.
We meet with parents, speak with school contacts, and review any prior evaluations. Every source is gathered, compared, and synthesized.
You leave with a complete, plain-language picture of your teenager — what is happening, why, and what needs to change. Not a form letter. A real formulation, built for your family.

Learn about the different levels of assessment: https://www.thekrasnerinstitute.com/assess/

Treatment

Treatment is based on the whole picture

For many teenagers, the most effective first step is not a clinical office at all. Outdoor therapy, art therapy, and music therapy are first-line clinical interventions at the Krasner Institute — not supplemental services, and not a fallback for teenagers who resist talk therapy. They are where we begin.

Teenagers who won’t engage in a room will often engage outside. Teenagers who can’t yet find words for what they’re carrying can often find them through creative expression. We meet your teenager where they are, and we build from there.

As the relationship develops, the work deepens. For some teenagers, expressive and arts-based work continues as the primary modality. For others it moves toward cognitive behavioral therapy or dialectical behavior therapy when they are ready for more structured work. The path is chosen based on what this teenager needs.
As the relationship develops, the work deepens. For some teenagers, expressive and arts-based work continues as the primary modality. For others it moves toward cognitive behavioral therapy or dialectical behavior therapy when they are ready for more structured work. The path is chosen based on what this teenager needs.
Individual work is at the center. A genuine clinical relationship that respects your teenager’s privacy, earns their trust, and builds the capacity for self-understanding they will carry beyond their time with us.
Individual work is at the center. A genuine clinical relationship that respects your teenager’s privacy, earns their trust, and builds the capacity for self-understanding they will carry beyond their time with us.
Individual work is at the center. A genuine clinical relationship that respects your teenager’s privacy, earns their trust, and builds the capacity for self-understanding they will carry beyond their time with us.

Planning

Treatment ends with graduation

At the Krasner Institute, the plan is always evolving. We track your teenager’s progress with standardized measures, reviewed by the full clinical team. We meet with the family every 8 to 12 weeks specifically to review the data, update the treatment plan, and assess where you are in the arc of care.

Most families move through three phases:

Active

The full clinical team is running. Individual work, parent support, school collaboration, and care coordination are all in motion.

Maintenance

Primary targets have been met. The frequency of services reduces deliberately, shifting focus to building independence and consolidating gains.

Alumni

Active treatment is no longer needed, but the relationship with the Krasner Institute continues. Annual check-ins, priority access, and the knowledge that the clinical team already knows your teenager’s history.

You are not entering a system that holds people indefinitely. You are entering a system designed to make itself progressively less necessary — to build the capacity in your teenager and your family to navigate what comes next.

When a teenager completes care at the Krasner Institute, we call it graduation, not discharge. Dr. Krasner writes a graduation summary: a narrative of the arc of the work, what your family came in with, what changed, and what your teenager’s strengths are going forward.

Teenage girl and boy with smartphone on green grass in park

Your teenager is a person, not a problem.

One of the things that most often damages treatment for teenagers is the feeling that everyone is talking about them rather than to them. They often feel like the adults have already decided what’s wrong and what the plan is, and the teenager is just along for the ride. That is not the approach at The Krasner Institute.

WHO WE SEE

Families come to us when the usual approaches have not been enough.

We work with teenagers navigating depression and the quiet collapse that can come with it. Anxiety that has started to organize their life around avoidance. OCD that has taken over their routines. Trauma that has never been fully named or addressed. ADHD that has been managed but not really understood.

Eating concerns that are beginning to define their relationship with their body. School refusal and academic failure that baffle everyone who loves them. Emotional dysregulation that is straining every relationship at home.

And presentations that do not fit neatly into any single category — the complex, layered, treatment-complicated cases that require someone who can hold the whole picture.
If your teenager is struggling and you are not sure whether this is the right level of care, the answer is: call us. We will tell you honestly what we think.

Frequently Asked Questions

This is one of the most common situations we encounter. We can begin with a parent consultation — no teenager required — so that we understand the situation and can advise on how to approach the conversation with your teen. In many cases, once the teenager hears that this place approaches them differently, the resistance shifts. We can also speak directly with your teenager by phone before the first appointment if that helps. We have a lot of experience with resistance.

We take confidentiality seriously, and we take the therapeutic alliance with your teenager seriously. We will not share the specific content of individual sessions without your teenager’s consent, except where there is a genuine safety concern. We discuss this framework with both the teenager and the parents at the outset, so everyone understands the boundaries. Most families find that this structure actually deepens the teenager’s willingness to engage in treatment.

Our adolescent assessment is a structured, multi-week process. It begins with our digital intake platform, which gathers developmental history, prior records, and a detailed picture of your teenager’s life before we meet. We then conduct a full psychiatric evaluation with your teenager directly, a separate parent session, school consultation, and a review of any prior evaluations or records. The assessment concludes with a family feedback meeting in which we walk through our findings and co-create the treatment plan together.

That depends entirely on the nature and complexity of your teenager’s difficulties. Most families are in active treatment for 3 to 12 months. We track progress with standardized measures every few weeks and review the plan formally every 8 to 12 weeks. We are explicit about the criteria for moving to the next phase — you will always know where you are and what the path forward looks like.

Prior treatment is valuable context, not a reason to start from scratch. We review all prior records, understand what has been tried and what has not worked, and build on that history rather than ignoring it. Many of the families who come to us have already been through one or more treatment attempts. Our assessment is specifically designed to understand why prior approaches have not been sufficient — and to identify what has to be different this time.

Yes, actively. School consultation is a built-in component of the adolescent treatment plan. We communicate with school teams, support IEP and 504 processes, and translate clinical findings into educational language that schools can act on. Many of the teenagers we see are struggling academically, and school collaboration is often one of the most important levers for change.

Ready to understand what’s happening with your teenager?

Most families come to us after months or years of trying to figure it out on their own — or through a system that wasn’t built to hold the complexity of what their teenager is going through.

We are.

Call us, or send a message through the portal. Iona McPeake, our Director of Clinical Operations, will respond within one business day. She will answer your questions, explain what the process looks like, and help you decide whether the Krasner Institute is the right fit.

Call: 203-762-6442 Email Us

Ages 13–18