In this week’s episode I sat down with Richard Hogan. Richard is a systemically trained Family Psychotherapist registered with The Family Therapy Association of Ireland. 

He writes every Thursday for the Irish Examiner, a national newspaper with daily readers of 250,000. His column explores mental health issues for teenagers, couples and families. 

Alongside that, he was recently nominated for a journalistic award and is the author of the best selling book “Parenting the Screenager”. His book is a practical guide for parents of the modern child. The book has received critical acclaim from The Irish Times as a ‘must buy for any parent of a teenager’. 

I’ve also included a link to the book on Amazon in the show notes so be sure to check it out here.

He is also the clinical director of the award winning counselling service Therapy Institute.  As a result of his work, he was invited by Trinity College Dublin to undertake a PhD exploring how to introduce systemic theory into the Irish educational system. He was recently awarded a Fulbright scholarship and is planning to travel to America later this year to carry out research on how to better promote inclusion in Irish and American Schools. 

Richard has worked with adolescents for over fifteen years and in that time noticed the increasing tendency to pathologise what is otherwise normal adolescent behaviour. His approach to adolescent mental health is to empower them so that they do not have to rely on heavy psychotropic medication. 

When he’s not writing or in his clinical practise, he is a regular contributor on shows such as The Hard Shoulder with Ivan Yates Newstalk, The Today Show RTÉ and Ireland AM Virgin Media as an expert in the field of human behaviour where he offers his expertise and strategies on how to overcome mental health issues. 

He was also very recently an expert on a new T.V programme launched by Virgin Media which we spoke about during the interview, due to hit screens near us very soon.

We discussed digital wellbeing, how to navigate technology and mental health, through the lens of adolescence, but also more broadly too. How technology has arguably interrupted patterns of communication and how we all socialise, the demonisation of social media and where our inner drivers in life stem from. 

It was a fascinating conversation with Richard, and I could have certainly asked many more questions. In fact, I was told on more than one occasion this week that I should make my interviews long form so perhaps there’s another interview to be had in there. 

For anyone with screenagers, or in fact children of any age, but perhaps finds themselves mindful of the challenges that come from children using technology, and questioning how best to navigate this space, then this episode is for you. 

Social media links:
LinkedIn

Richard’s Book:

Parenting the Screenager