Therapy & Mental Health Care in Manhattan Beach

The pressure here is real, and it is specific

Manhattan Beach Unified runs five elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school. That concentration is part of what makes the district good. It also means a fifteen-year-old's entire social world, academic record, athletic identity, and reputation all live inside a single building with the same few hundred people, for four years, with no room to reinvent themselves.

Layer onto that a college-admissions culture where the expected outcome is set early and everyone knows everyone else's list. What that produces is not laziness or defiance. It is a kid who is performing well and quietly running on empty, or one who has decided that not trying is safer than trying and falling short.

Why the location helps

One of the most common things we hear from Manhattan Beach teenagers is that they do not want to be seen walking into a therapist's office. In a one-high-school town that is not paranoia. Being a few minutes down the coast in Hermosa Beach means the waiting room is not populated by their classmates and their classmates' parents, and telehealth removes the question altogether for families who prefer it.

What we work on with families here

• Teen therapy for anxiety, depression, perfectionism, and burnout that started before adulthood
• Family therapy when the conflict is in the system rather than in one person
• ADHD and neuropsychological testing with reports that support school and standardized-test accommodations
• Young adult therapy for the ones who left for college and came home unwell
• Psychiatry when medication is genuinely part of the answer, and a clear conversation when it is not
• Individual therapy for the parents, which is more common than people expect

Testing, and why the report matters

When a bright student is underperforming and nobody can say why, a formal evaluation answers the question a tutor cannot. Ours are performed by Dr. Daniel Hai, PsyD, a licensed psychologist and clinical neuropsychologist. That distinction matters practically: only a proper report supports accommodations at school or extended time on the SAT and ACT, and it also separates ADHD from the anxiety, sleep loss, and depression that imitate it. Treating the wrong one costs a year.

For the adults

Manhattan Beach adults arrive with their own version of the same pressure: careers with real stakes, burnout that gets described as a busy season for several years running, marriages strained by two demanding jobs and the logistics of raising children here. We treat that as its own work, not as an accessory to the teenager's.

Getting started

Start with a free 15-minute consultation. If it is about your teenager, you can make that call without them, and part of what we will talk about is how to raise it at home in a way that does not land as a punishment.