Should always a parent tell his minor son the truth about ‪‎meds‬ he’s taking?

#‎Trust‬ is the most important thing when we deal with ‪#‎teenagers‬, whether if you are a therapist, a friend, a parent…
What will happen when he’ll discover the truth?
Because he’s 17, maybe he will get curious about what acne meds he’s taking, etc…, and maybe he will ask you if you knew the truth: think about the importance of therapist-patient relationship and you may foresee it will ruin the therapy.

There is another factor: the commitment and the compliance.
They are mandatory for the success of any therapy.
- On the psychotherapy side, they are mandatory because the patient needs to come to the awareness of his healing path.
- On the meds side, they are mandatory to make the patient stick with the cure.

If this behavior may be good on a meds point of view, it’s a failure on a psychotherapy point of view, and please remember how important is the psychotherapeutic process when we talk about depression.

There is another aspect you have to consider: the mother and her decision to hide the truth.
If you agree with her then you become her accomplice against the teen: how will you be able to keep the honesty climate with your young patient?

You have to analyze how they came to that situation: you have to find the pattern.
Who diagnosed the ‪#‎Depression‬ issue so that she started with the meds?
Does a doctor prescribe her those meds or did the mother acted on her own?
How did she come to hide the truth to her son? Did she act on her own or had she been suggested by someone?

The answers will give you the elements to manage and fix the situation.

The what: the teen needs to know the truth.
The how: it depends on the patterns and the forces that led to all of this, and most of all it depends on the relationship YOU have with the teen.

Obviously you shouldn’t do this without the mother’s awareness: there is the risk to enter a war that doesn’t belong to you.

So you first should talk to the mother and make her reflect about it and agree to reveal the truth.
Then she doesn’t need to be the first one: she may let you talk with her son.