Adolescents in Crisis: on Hypothesizing with Minimal Information

Abstract

This paper suggests some of the questions that practitioners should ask themselves when faced with an adolescent in crisis. It is important that professionals have available a number of levels for conceptualizing behaviour if they are to make sense of complex information. Minimal information from a referral is given to demonstrate our approach. We consider some issues connected with change in systems; symptomatic behaviour in a life cycle context; agency contexts as they affect professional help; and adolescent development in the context of marital breakdown. The practitioner is encouraged to develop hypotheses, while having very few facts which in the light of further contact may be developed, or discarded in favour of hypotheses more relevant to the particular family. We warn against the equal, but different dangers of approaching each new family either with a totally open mind, or with fixed ideas concerning what it ‘must be about’. We do not argue that it is better to have little or no previous history (although too much history can become part of ‘the problem’), but that workers always have more information, from the very start, than they may realise.