excerpt from Coping with Cliques

starting off …

You’re thinking that you could never be the bully. Oh no, everyone likes you. Or maybe they don’t like you and they’ve teased you in the past, but you would never ever do to them what they did to you. Well, guess again. After all, you’re only human. If a situation presents itself, wouldn’t you be the slightest bit tempted? You probably would. But resist that temptation, or else the gossip-bully syndrome will go on and on, knocking everyone down and making school utterly and totally poisonous. You can choose to respond in a way that will make it stop.

Excerpt from What's Eating You?

focus

This exercise will help you become more aware of your individuality and understand that who you are inside is the real you.

Every day, we are bombarded with television, radio, and magazine ads that focus on plastic surgery, dieting, clothes, and make-up. The media focus on appearance is so strong that many of us fall into the trap of identifying our outside appearances as the “real” us and forgetting who we really are on the inside.

So how do you focus more on who you are inside? How are you different from everyone else? How do you find the real you? One way is to remember that you are more than your appearance.

excerpt from Facing Bipolar

You are much more than your bipolar disorder. You do not need to let it define you. You can attain success, happiness, fulfillment, and achievement in life despite having bipolar disorder. But at the same time, the bipolar experience is one that often sits at your core—in your brain, in your emotions, and consequently very much in your sense of who you are. It’s not in an elbow or a foot. Generally speaking, the experience of the disorder feels more like "being," as opposed to "having," yet you will hear people in normal conversation speak of both being bipolar and of having bipolar disorder.

excerpt from The Bipolar Workbook for Teens

A chronic condition like bipolar disorder can be so overwhelming that it seems like it defines who you are. But you are not bipolar disorder, and bipolar disorder isn't you! You're a lot more than just someone with bipolar disorder.

by guest blogger Sheri Van Dijk, MSW, author of The Bipolar Workbook for Teens

I recently read an article about a study that compared high school and college students from 1938 to those in 2007, and concluded that mental health problems such as depression and anxiety are much more of a problem for modern-day students than they were in the past. It does seem that mental illness is affecting more and more people at a younger age – or perhaps we’re just more aware of these kinds of problems now. Regardless, there are things we can do to prepare kids better for the pressures they’ll be facing in life.

Excerpt from

At this time in your life you are most likely going through the challenging process of figuring out your identity or who you are while trying to be the person your friends and family want you to be. This is likely to cause you additional stress. The more you learn about who you truly are, who you want to be, and what is most important to you, the better equipped you will be to cope with stress that comes from trying to meet others’ expectations of you.