Adolescent Girls in Crisis: Intervention and Hope / Edition 1

by Martha B. Straus Ph.D.

Overview

Millions of adolescent girls are in a crisis of rage and despair.

Some try to disappear through starvation; others carve indecipherable symbols or other marks onto their arms and bodies; some run away from home; and still others bully and get bullied, hide weeping in their rooms, or attempt suicide.

Programs, experts, and interventions abound, but therapists and caregivers alike struggle to effectively help this challenging population. For every success in turning a troubled girl around, there seem to be new, even sadder cases to take its place. The list of reasons, as Straus explains, are complicated and varied everything from weak, fragmented interventions and overwhelmed institutions with inadequate resources to a growing gap between the rich and poor, ignorant parents, overcrowded schools, and a more violence-saturated society than ever before.

Using a developmental-relational model of intervention, Straus explores the ways in which clinicians and caregivers can successfully reach out to the children behind these often frightening behaviors, and how to help them cope. A highly practical resource, Adolescent Girls in Crisis explores concrete strategies and methods for helping girls in crisis by focusing on identification, diagnosis, and treatment of many of the troubled and troubling behaviors—including oppositional defiant disorder, trauma, eating disorders, and attachment problems, among others—what to look for before there's a crisis (and in one), what to worry about, and, most of all, what to do.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393704471
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/17/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 9.60(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Martha B. Straus, Ph.D., is Professor of Clinical Psychology at Antioch University New England Graduate School, and Adjunct Instructor in Psychiatry at Dartmouth Medical School. She maintains a private practice, consults, and conducts workshops. She is the author of No-Talk Therapy for Children and Adolescents and Violence in the Lives of Adolescents.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     ix
Preface     xi
Introduction     xvii
The Culture of Rage and Despair
The Secret Lives of Teenage Girls     3
The Adolescent Passage     27
Systems in an Uproar     63
The War on Girls     87
Interventions: Treating the Whole Girl
Ten Tips from the Trenches: Doing Good Work with Girls     103
Getting Connected     117
Troubled Behaviors I: Affective Disorders and Anxiety Disorders     145
Troubled Behaviors II: Eating Disorders and Self-Mutilation     173
Troubled Behaviors III: Attachment and Trauma Problems     195
Troubled Behaviors IV: Social Aggression, ADHD, and Oppositional-Defiant Disorder     221
Troubled Behaviors V: Sex, Conduct Disorders, and Substance Abuse     245
Psychotropic Medication in the Treatment of Adolescent Girls   Robert J. Racusin, MD     283
Hospitalization and Out-of-Home Interventions     307
Ten Reasons for Hope     335
References     345
Index     379