Chapter ‘Too late for me’ : IN Book: Psychoanalytic Crisis Work with Adolescents

Abstract

Psychoanalytic Crisis Work with Adolescents: An Independent Approach offers a clinical and theoretical examination of the seemingly omnipresent and ever-growing mental health difficulties and crises that teenagers face today. The book starts by grounding the reader in a contemporary perspective on adolescent development, exploring the adolescent mental health crisis as it is experienced today. Integrating psychoanalytic and sociocultural perspectives, it explores adolescent crises and risk-taking behaviours, including suicidality, overdose, and self-harm by cutting. The book then outlines practical ways of working clinically with the adolescent, alongside their parents, carers, and educators. Core themes throughout the chapters include the primacy of identity and belonging in adolescence and the impact of the external world on internal emotional reality, such as peer relations, the media and internet, family, and wider political and social realities. This book is essential reading for psychotherapists and psychoanalytically trained clinicians working with teenagers struggling with these difficulties, as well as other health professionals and parents looking for guidance on handling troubling behaviour.