Adolescent Girls in Crisis: Intervention and Hope

Martha B. Straus

Praise for Adolescent Girls in Crisis:

“Martha Straus has done an incomparable service with this seminal work. From describing the social, everyday aspects of contemporary girl life, to exploring the specifics of what actually matters when treating teen girls, to untangling the confusions of modern diagnosis—Straus goes for it all. With clarity and compassion, she writes to clinicians at all levels of sophistication. If you want to know how to understand and handle adolescent girls today, this is the one book you should read.”
—Ron Taffel, Ph.D., author of Breaking Through to Teens

“Adolescent Girls in Crisis is a rare and exemplary text, exploring with compassion and care the complicated choreography and intimate grammar of the clinical relationship during this most delicate and vulnerable of developmental stages. Always respectful of the complexity of the adolescent passage, and without ever losing her humility, humor, and humanity, Straus generously offers a wealth of trenchant insights and practical strategies that enable the reader to clinically intervene with wisdom, sensitivity, and effectiveness.”
—Brad Sachs, Ph.D., psychologist and author of When No One Understands and The Good Enough Teen

Overview—Contents—Excerpt

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.

Contents

Preface

Part I: The Culture of Rage and Despair

Introduction

1. The Secret Lives of Teenage Girls

2. The Adolescent Passage

3. Systems in an Uproar

4. The War on Girls

Part II: Interventions: Treating the Whole Girl

5. Ten Tips from the Trenches: Doing Good Work with Girls

6. Getting Connected

7. Troubled Behaviors I: Affective Disorders and Anxiety Disorders

8. Troubled Behaviors II: Eating Disorders and Self-Mutilation

9. Troubled Behaviors III: Attachment and Trauma Problems

10. Troubled Behaviors IV: Social Aggression, ADHD, and Oppositional Defiant Disorder

11. Troubled Behaviors V: Sex, Conduct Disorders, and Substance Abuse

12. Psychotropic Medication in the Treatment of Adolescent Girls, by Robert J. Racusin, M.D.

13. Hospitalizations and Out-of-Home

Excerpt

From Adolescent Girls in Crisis:

[…] too many teenage girls have become strangers among us. Maybe parents, teachers, therapists and other adults who care are too inattentive, or maybe we can't resist the cultural riptide that is pulling our girls away. Perhaps we believe the darkness of this adolescent tunnel is just a journey they'll get through on their own anyway, as so many of us did before. Maybe our reactions are the best we can muster, so we have to just trust that we're doing a good enough job intervening and helping.

And it's true: the vast majority of these girls will, with a little luck, emerge on the adult side by their late 20s, a little bruised and lonely perhaps, but whole enough. Some will make it into therapist's offices then, and wonder, how was it possible that no one saw, that no one tried to help, that no one seemed to know what to do? In hindsight anyway, their suffering was obvious enough.

Often, our responses aren't even adequate. We can do better by girls. Whatever the causes (and it matters what they are), the loss is theirs and ours. It's deeply personal, explicitly cultural, unarguably societal.

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.

ISBN 10: 0-393-70447-5
ISBN 13: 978-0-393-70447-1
2007 / 240 pages / Hardcover