Dr. Frank Bartolomeo, Senior Clinical Advisor, Adolescent Services, at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, will speak to us on the mental health crisis facing adolescents in America today. As we have seen in recent years, there has been a serious increase in depression and anxiety among adolescents and young adults, viewed from virtually all measures. A high percentage of college students are burdened with anxieties that interfere with their daily functioning. The number of visits by children and young adults to emergency rooms for suicidal ideation has increased significantly. And rates of depression have gone up dramatically.
For Dr. Bartolomeo, time is of the essence: “I am driven by the knowledge that if we can intervene in a teen crisis today to help build resilience, we may prevent longer term suffering.” Increasing resilience to Dr. Bartolomeo means having the capacity to bounce back from adversity through the support of meaningful relationships with friends, family or community. It has been a guiding principle for Dr. Bartolomeo over the course of his 30-year career working with 13- to 18-year-olds, as well as emerging adults ages 18 to 29. “And hand-in-hand with restoring that sense of connectedness,” he says, “is helping adolescents develop skills to cope with life on life’s terms.”
“Adolescence is a time of great vulnerability,” Dr. Bartolomeo says, “but also presents an opportunity to reduce the likelihood of teenage conditions continuing into adulthood.” In addition to his work with adolescents at Silver Hill, he provides group therapy at Steward House, the program for executives and high-profile individuals.
Frank comes from a large Italian-Irish family and grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Massachusetts. He is a first-generation college graduate. He received his B.A. in History from University of Massachusetts Amherst and studied abroad at the University of London. Unable to find a job teaching history, he found himself working at a residential program for profoundly disturbed children. Subsequently, he earned his Masters of Social Work degree from Boston University and his Ph.D. in Social Work from Simmons University in Boston. His doctoral research focused on the use of group therapy with resistant teenagers.
Throughout his career, Frank has been passionate about the healing power of groups. For the first 15 years of his career, Frank worked primarily in the public sector, first with adjudicated gang members for Boston’s inner-city. In 2005, he was introduced to the world of private behavioral healthcare and became the Clinical Director, then Executive Director of a private therapeutic boarding school in the Berkshires for troubled adolescents from affluent families. Dr. Bartolomeo was struck by the similarities in behaviors between adolescents across the socio-economic spectrum. Counter-intuitively, affluence has been found to be a risk factor for adolescent depression, anxiety, and substance abuse.
A frequent speaker at the local and national level, Frank volunteers as a consulting editor for the Journal of the American Society of Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama. His most recent scholarly publication (2022) was a co-authored book chapter: Bartolomeo, F., Stafford, A., & Gerber, A. (2022). Emerging Adulthood: A review of developmental perspectives. In Z. Kahn & J. Martinez (Eds.), Emerging adults in therapy. (pp. 3 -19). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Arranged by Tom Igoe