When Your Teenager's Mind Gets Loud: Understanding Intrusive Thoughts and OCD in Adolescents, and How You Can Help
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : December 2026
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 238
- Category :
Forthcoming - Category 2 :
Child and Adolescent Studies - Catalogue No : 98710
- ISBN 13 : 9781041399452
- ISBN 10 : 1041399456
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When Your Teenager’s Mind Gets Loud is a compassionate and practical guide for parents navigating the challenges of adolescent obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Clinical psychologist Marcus Lewton offers clear and relatable insights into the emotional and psychological experiences your teenager may be facing, helping you better understand and support your child during this difficult time.
Through real-life examples and accessible language, Dr Lewton explains how obsessive-compulsive behaviours develop and how your responses as a parent can reduce conflict and foster emotional growth. You’ll discover tools to break the reassurance loop, support your child’s treatment journey, and create a calmer, steadier home environment. By focusing on your teenager’s internal experience and the development of intrusive thoughts, this book empowers you to help your child separate from the fear driving their behaviours and move towards emotional growth.
Whether you are encountering OCD for the first time or searching for new ways to support your child, this book is here to guide you. It provides the understanding, clarity, and practical advice you need to help your teenager and your family find steadiness and hope. Professionals working with young people, including school staff, youth workers, and clinicians, as well as trainees in psychology, psychiatry, and education, will also find wisdom in its pages.
Reviews and Endorsements
'This expertly crafted book tenderly navigates the emotional landscape of intrusive thoughts and OCD and its impact on family relationships. Intrusive thoughts and OCD are discussed with such gentleness and attention to emotional attunement that it envelops the reader in a sense of feeling held and contained at the most distressing of times. What unfolds is a narrative that offers the underpinnings of an emotional and relational model of parental and systemic responding within OCD distress whilst also offering parents permission to create space and remain steady alongside their loved one. Crucially, it provides an important framework for preserving and maintaining the most important factor for young adults in distress: the relationship.’
Dr Heledd Lewis, DClinPsy, HCPC Registered Practitioner Psychologist, Former NHS Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Clinical Lead, Member, Association of Clinical Psychologists (Complex Mental Health Faculty)
‘As a Specialist CAMHS Nurse, I work closely with children and young people experiencing OCD and, just as importantly, with the parents who support them every day. This book is an invaluable resource that combines professional expertise with genuine compassion. It offers parents a deeper understanding of both OCD and the challenges families can face when living alongside it, while gently guiding them in how they can support their child with confidence. Thoughtful, accessible, and deeply empathetic, it highlights the powerful role parents can play in creating a sense of safety and stability, even when OCD feels overwhelming. I have no doubt that many families will find comfort, encouragement, and hope within these pages. An excellent and much-needed addition to the resources available for parents.’
Kelly-Jane Williams, Specialist Child and Adolescent Mental Health Nurse
‘My wife and I have found this book instrumental in helping us understand our teenage daughter. We've struggled for years, attended all the appointments, and used all the resources, but it wasn't until this book that we appreciated how the relationship one has with their OCD can really influence how they respond, and how we can respond in turn. Times can still be challenging, but now we have a fighting chance. We just wish we'd had this thinking earlier.’
Parents, sharing their experience of the book
‘I have had the privilege of working with Marcus over several years. He is highly thoughtful about his patients, bringing an ongoing curiosity to his work with patients and families that is both dynamic and individual. He applies sensitive thinking throughout his clinical work, and this book captures these qualities from the outset. Marcus draws on a range of modalities, integrating his knowledge and experience into his clinical practice in a way the book reflects throughout. It is highly relatable for patients and families, written so that parents of children experiencing OCD can recognise their own experience in its pages. The book allows readers to see beyond the symptoms of OCD, exploring the panic, terror, and complexity parents face, and the positions they find themselves in when trying to understand the mind of a child living with OCD.’
Gary Catterall, PsychD, Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, ACP
Table of Contents
1. No manual for the mind, let alone an anxious teenage mind
2. Hearing the thought that terrifies us
3. Beyond behaviour: Seeing the symbolic mind
4. Four ways OCD takes hold
5. When OCD becomes the Enforcer
6. When OCD Pulls the Shutters Down
7. When OCD becomes a Sealed World
8. The Repairing Mind: From reassurance to relationship
9. The medication question
10. Neurodiversity and OCD
11. The work of containment
12. Translating therapy home
13. On caring and being cared for
14. When OCD holds up a mirror
About the Author(s)
Marcus Lewton is a child and adolescent clinical psychologist based in the UK. His work in independent practice and public services focuses on a wide range of adolescent mental health issues, with a specialist interest in intrusive thoughts and OCD. He is the author of Intrusive Thoughts and Compulsions in Adolescent OCD: A Psychoanalytic Framework for Treatment (2026).
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