Troubled Youth Research Articles

Longitudinal study of a dual-factor model of mental health in Chinese youth

By incorporating psychopathology and subjective well-being (SWB), the dual-factor model of mental health (DFM) can comprehensively measure psychological health. We examined the utility of the DFM among 1,293 Chinese adolescents (Grades 7–12). Furthermore, we examined the dynamics of mental health group membership via a two-wave longitudinal study of 531 students. SWB, psychopathology, affective self-regulatory efficacy, academic self-efficacy, and academic emotions were measured via self-report scales. Mental health group membership was determined according to combinations of high or low SWB and high or low psychopathology. The DFM was supported by our identification of its four constituent groups (i.e. complete mental health, vulnerable, troubled, and symptomatic but content). Significant group differences were found in affective self-regulatory efficacy, academic self-efficacy, and academic emotions, with clear contrasts observed between adolescents with complete mental health and their vulnerable peers, as well as between troubled adolescents and their symptomatic but content peers. Moreover, youth with complete mental health demonstrated the highest stability and troubled youth the lowest, whereas vulnerable youth had the highest rates of transitioning into both the complete mental health and troubled groups. Implications for practice are explored within the context of screening and intervention.

Aufzeichnungen aus dem Irrenhaus by Christine Lavant

Reviewed by: Aufzeichnungen aus dem Irrenhausby Christine Lavant Francis Michael Sharp Christine Lavant, Aufzeichnungen aus dem Irrenhaus. A new edition with an Afterword by Klaus Amann. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016. 140 pp. Twice the winner of the Georg Trakl Prize for poetry during her lifetime (in 1954 and 1964) as well as the recipient of the Großen Österreichischen Staatspreis in 1970, Christine Lavant (1915–1973) left behind a literary output of more than a thousand poems, a dozen works of short prose, and two thousand letters. She was born into a large impoverished family in the Carinthian mountains of Austria, the ninth offspring of a coal miner. Later in life she replaced the family name Thonhauser with Lavant—the name of a river flowing through the valley where she was born—perhaps as a reminder of the more pleasant memories of her childhood. Because of her poor health she was forced to drop out of school at an early age. From her letters, we know that she wrote her first autobiographical pieces of prose shortly after the end of World War II, in jubilation—Klaus Amann, editor of this volume, surmises—at the opportunity to escape the chaos of the war and Nazi oppression and to focus on her troubled youth in written form as a kind of "Heimkehr zu den Anfängen" (108). Das Krüglein, Das Kind, and Aufzeichnungen aus dem Irrenhausall spring directly from this past. The [End Page 193]first of these, a work she herself called "ein erzähltes Stück Leben" (101), depicts the family life into which she was born in 1915. In Das Kindshe recalls her first extended absence from home at the age of nine at the hospital in Klagenfurt where her imperiled eyesight was saved. Then in 1935, after an unsuccessful attempt to take her own life, she spent another six weeks in the state asylum at the same hospital, an episode of her life she depicts in Aufzeichnungen. Stylistically written as a diary, this story remained unpublished during her lifetime, although her friend, the Austrian-British writer and translator Nora Purtscher, managed to have an English translation— Asylum Diary—broadcast by the BBC on November 10, 1959. Purtscher succeeded in the venture in spite of Lavant's last-minute hesitancy in releasing her heavily autobiographical story into the public domain. It only belatedly appeared in print in the original German for the first time by the Otto Müller Verlag in 2001. "Ich bin auf Abteilung Zwei," begin Lavant's notes recording her arrival and medical placement in the asylum. Immediately she describes the first of numerous controversies that suddenly arose during her two weeks there, some between patients, others involving patients, medical personnel, or caretakers. Lavant's very presence in this unit for less serious cases arouses resentment in one figure labeled "die Königin" (7), who views her as a possible spy; that is, she finds it highly suspicious that a new member of the asylum community would begin her stay in unit two and not have first "earned" her way out of unit three, which is reserved for the more seriously impaired. Another patient, Renate, voices her disgust with the content and tone of the "Queen's" words, a reaction that encourages Lavant to develop closer ties of affection to Renate throughout the narrative. She repeatedly demonstrates a need for such reactions from her and other sympathetic asylum inhabitants, yet resists voicing harsh judgments about even the most problematic or revolting figures around her. Her letters, Amann notes, are filled with expressions of this fundamental craving for attention and love (107). Characters on the floor of the asylum randomly catch the focus of the diarist's attention, figures that she encounters in the rooms, halls, and toilets accessible to all inhabitants. Initially, the majority are very generally identifiable as fellow inmates or nursing staff by their names, actions, and language. The narrator sketches short scenes based on her perceptions—one following the other—in the order in which they occur. often the allusion to another figure, a fall, the shouted threat of a straitjacket or an outburst of poetic lines or obscenities...

Patterns of Psychotropic Medication at Admission for Youth in Residential Care

High levels of psychotropic medication use and polypharmacy are common for emotionally and behaviorally troubled youth entering residential care. Polypharmacy has often been characterized as an especially serious problem in this vulnerable population. Latent Class Analysis was used to identify medication subgroups for 636 youth in an intensive residential program. Additionally, auxiliary analyses (e.g., diagnoses, demographics, expressed problem behaviors) were used to identify the personal and behavioral attributes associated with individuals in each of the latent classes. Three distinct medication patterns emerged: low/no psychotropic medication, the combination of antidepressant and antipsychotic medications, and multiple psychotropic medications. The latent classes were significantly different from one another on 12 of the 14 variables, helping explicate how patient and clinical characteristics underlie patterns of psychotropic medication use. Findings of this study, combined with additional research, hold promise for leading to improved, youth-centered prescribing practices. Our findings also highlight the need for careful monitoring of the types and range of medications that some youth are prescribed, and research on how youth with certain background characteristics are more likely to get prescribed multiple psychotropic medications. For youth experiencing higher levels of psychotropic polypharmacy, medication regimens need thoughtful reassessment using the principle of sufficiency as the foundation for medication management.

Weaving the Future in Holistic Education: Key Principles and Implications for Serving Todays Troubled Youths and Families

The main aim of holistic education is to call forth from people an intrinsic reverence for life and a passionate love of learning. Unfortunately, many of today’s modern societies appear to focus on the pursuit of material possessions and career advancement. Arguing that spiritual growth is part and parcel of the personal, social and emotional development, education and care of youths, this paper present some key principals for educators and other professionals working with troubled youths and their families. It concludes that the well-being of our spiritual life not only goes a long way toward overcoming the sense of fragmentation and alienation that so many of our students feel, but will also helps our next generation lead more meaningful lives.

Creating Crime

Beginning with the Johnson administration, this article examines the development of the juvenile justice system and the subsequent criminalization of African American youth and the urban spaces they inhabited. Soon after Lyndon Johnson called for the “War on Crime” in 1965, federal officials merged the social welfare and law enforcement measures of the Great Society in new and innovative ways. The administration designed programs such as Youth Service Bureaus to reign in potential lawbreakers as well as offer assistance to troubled youth. As federal policymakers expanded the reach and resources of the Bureaus and other juvenile delinquency programs during the 1970s, they required youth employment initiatives, public schools, and grassroots organizations to partner with juvenile courts, police departments, and correctional facilities to receive funding. Following the enactment of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, however, the ongoing absorption of social service initiatives by crime control programs rapidly escalated. The legislation created a national justice system for young offenders and formally labeled all economically vulnerable youth “potentially criminal.” In an attempt to control future crime, the terms of the 1974 Act diffused crime control techniques into the everyday lives of black urban children, yielding new possibilities for supervision in public schools, housing projects, and within families on welfare. By the end of the 1970s, the United States had the highest youth incarceration rate of any industrialized nation as a result of this uniquely punitive approach to urban social programs.

Emergent subjectivity in caring institutions for teenagers

We investigate how different mealtime situations help shape teenager and staff subjectivities in two Swedish residential care homes and a special school for girls and boys, 12–15 years old, with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. Three mealtime networks are analysed using concepts from actor–network theory, treating architectural space and artefacts, as well as teenagers and staff, as actors. The architectural spaces in the kitchen and dining room were first created for other purposes than residential care for troubled youth (i.e. a former farm, hospital and preschool) and have been adapted to be more homelike while coping with housing and feeding 20 or more people. The original architectural spaces as well as activities before mealtimes were powerful actors in the mealtime network, causing different subjectivities to emerge in the translations. The subjectivities emerge in the first network as offenders/guards, in the second network as small children/nannies and in the third network as guests/service staff. The different translations in the three meal networks create different mobilization opportunities for the teenagers concerning responsibility and normality.

Three Decades Later: The Life Experiences and Mid-Life Functioning of 1980s Heavy Metal Groupies, Musicians, and Fans

Research in the 1980s suggested that young “metalheads” were at risk for poor developmental outcomes. No other study has assessed this group as adults; thus, we examined 1980s heavy metal groupies, musicians, and fans at middle age, using snowball sampling from Facebook. Online surveys assessed adverse childhood experiences, personality, adult attachment, and past and current functioning in 377 participants. Results revealed that metal enthusiasts did often experience traumatic and risky “sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll” lives. However, the “metalhead” identity also served as a protective factor against negative outcomes. They were significantly happier in their youth and better adjusted currently than either middle-aged or current college-age youth comparison groups. Thus, participation in fringe style cultures may enhance identity development in troubled youth.

NEET in disguise? Rival narratives in troubled youth transitions

Background: The concept of NEET (young people not in employment, education or training) was introduced to capture the varieties of youth labour market disengagement and has become a standard statistical indicator for labour market performance. However, it is criticised for simplifying the heterogeneity of young people in problematic youth transitions and for emphasising their deficiencies in terms of affiliation to key institutions in youth transitions.Purpose: The article contributes to the research on youth transitions by offering a narrative perspective on the status of NEET. Its purpose is to investigate how NEET periods are embedded and reflected within biographical action and self-perceptions.Sample: The article is based on the analysis of 21 cases from a qualitative longitudinal study about coping strategies of secondary school-leavers in school-to-work transitions in a city in the west of Germany (altogether, 180 interviews were conducted). During the first wave of interviewing in 2012, the young men and women were 16–20 years old.Design and methods: In order to reconstruct the young people’s biographical experiences of the transition as well as their interpretations of these experiences qualitative problem-centred interviews were carried out over three waves of data collection. The qualitative analysis combined case reconstructions with cross-case analysis of typical narratives, which focused on the identification of key themes organising the biographical orientation of the young people.Results: In biographical accounts, analysis revealed that NEET periods are embedded in analytically distinguishable rival narratives that establish different selective perspectives on events, choices and experiences. We identify seven main narratives related to the topics of vocational status, self-actualisation, meaningful activity, convenience, money, leisure and life problems. Young people are well aware of the problematic nature of NEET status. On the level of action, they try to avoid or exit them by accepting precarious and de-qualifying activities; on the level of biographical reflection, they use rival narratives to re-embed the NEET experience, to bypass it or avoid mentioning it altogether. We suggest calling this phenomenon ‘NEET in disguise’ (NID) referring to acts of system justification.Conclusions: This article shows how young people struggle to avoid and conceal the problematic status of NEET and thus, contribute to the institutionally suggested normalisation of biographical discontinuities.

At-School Substance Use as a Marker for Serious Health Risks

ObjectiveAt-school substance use is associated with increased rates of violence and delinquency. However, whether at-school substance use is a useful marker for other serious health risks and whether this association varies by gender or substance is still unclear. MethodsWe analyzed data from the national 2011 Youth Risk Behaviors Survey of 15,698 ninth to 12th grade students. We used multivariate regressions controlling for age and race and evaluated whether at-school marijuana and alcohol users were more likely than out-of-school users to exhibit 9 serious health risks (exposure to intoxicated driving, fighting, carrying a weapon at school, substance use with intercourse, experiencing intimate partner violence, being forced to have intercourse, experiencing depression, suicidal ideation, and attempting suicide). We included interaction terms to determine whether this association varied by gender or substance. ResultsAt-school alcohol and marijuana use were both associated with increased odds of all 9 serious health risks. The association between at-school substance use and fighting and being forced to have sex was greater for boys than for girls. Associations did not vary significantly by substance. Specificity of at-school substance use for serious health risks ranged from 0.93 to 0.96, and positive predictive values ranged from 0.23 to 0.69, well above the ranges for out-of-school use and nonuse. ConclusionsStudents found using alcohol or marijuana at school should be immediately and carefully screened for other serious health risks that pose significant present dangers; this might represent a critical opportunity to identify troubled youth.

Ambiguous spaces for troubled youth: home, therapeutic institution or school?

In Sweden and elsewhere, students permanently excluded from school are removed from their local environment, and sometimes their parental home, and moved to a rural residential care home. Thus ‘home’ and ‘school’ are clearly considered places where problems exist, but it is the young people themselves who are scrutinised and subjected to change. This study examined how the change of place and the performance of the alternative ‘home’ and alternative ‘school’ affected student adjustment. It also explored the significance of place in these measures and questioned how possibilities for agency and subjectivities are produced. The work comprised an ethnographic study of two residential care homes for troubled youth (aged 12–15). The results show how complex assemblages produce opportunities and limitations for care and education and how location and buildings partake in the constitution of possible subjectivities and agency. The analysis, inspired by actor-network theory, captured mobility and flow, an important aspect when studying complexity. The analytical approach used enabled the complex arrangements for disadvantaged teenagers to be studied in terms of social interactions, but also of materiality.

Development of Romantic Relationships in Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood: Implications for Community Mental Health

Romantic relationships emerge in the early adolescent years and mature over the course of adolescence from initial cross-gender affiliations to dyadic partnerships. Adolescents’ romantic relationships are important because they contribute to relational development and foretell the quality of intimate relationships in adulthood. This paper summarizes current research findings on the development of romantic relationships, focusing first on the normative stages of mainstream youth and subsequently on atypical patterns of troubled youth. Peer and family influences on romantic development are considered as well as ethnocultural variation. The paper concludes with several policy implications for community mental health.

Punishing kids: the rise of the ‘boot camp’

This paper is concerned with the rise of ‘the boot camp’ as a means of addressing ‘the problem’ of troubled youth’ in contemporary industrialised nations such as Australia and the UK. Drawing on a corpus of publicly available material including press releases and policy documents, media reports, and programme websites, the paper explores the legitimating discourses surrounding boot camps and suggests that they are a symptom of what Giroux [2011. “Youth in the Suspect Society and the Politics of Disposability.” Power Play: A Journal of Educational Justice 3 (1): 3–21] calls the ‘punishing state’. Such discourses work to construct young people as an escalating and uncontrollable problem, to frame this problem as individual rather than structural, and to suggest that state responses to problematic youth have been inadequate. Furthermore, we suggest, as the rationale for these boot camps indicate, that within this ‘punishing state', the militarisation of schooling is deemed to be an appropriate solution to this problem.

Using Popular Culture in the Classroom: Views of the Film Manic Among Students of Juvenile Delinquency

Students in an undergraduate course in Juvenile Delinquency viewed the film Manic, which depicts troubled youth in an institutional setting and touches on many of the core concepts students were exposed to throughout their course. Students then wrote reflective essays. The authors sampled from those essays, supplemented with reviews of the film, and presented these statements to the students in the form of a Q sort. Factor analysis revealed three distinct views, revolving around the effectiveness of institutional treatment for troubled youth. Interestingly, the factor most supportive of the institution was comprised mostly of Criminal Justice majors.

Youth victimization in Sweden: Prevalence, characteristics and relation to mental health and behavioral problems in young adulthood

The present study examines multiple types of victimization simultaneously, their prevalence and characteristics in childhood and adolescence, and it examines the associations between victimization and poly-victimization on the one hand and single and multiple mental health and behavioral problems on the other. The sample consisted of 2,500 Swedish young adults (20–24 years) who provided detailed report of multiple types of lifetime victimization and current health and behaviors via an interview and a questionnaire. Results showed that it was more common to be victimized in adolescence than in childhood and more common to be victimized repeatedly rather than a single time, among both males and females. Males and females were victimized in noticeably different ways and partially at different places and by different perpetrators. With regard to mental health and behavioral problems, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, self-harm, and criminality were clearly overrepresented among both males and females who had experienced any type of victimization. Poly-victimization was related to single and multiple mental health and behavioral problems among both males and females. We conclude that professionals need to conduct thorough evaluations of victimization when completing mental health assessments among troubled youths, and that youth might benefit from the development of interventions for poly-victimized youth.

I Want Him Locked Up

An impressive array of literature acknowledges the role of family members, friends, neighbors, and community institutions as rich resources of social capital which poor African American parents utilize in the collective socialization of their children. How parents access, mobilize, and deploy family and community-based social capital in resource-deprived communities for the social benefit of their children has been well documented. Yet, little is known about the challenges poor parents face raising troubled youth, particularly African American boys, when they are unable to generate social capital within their social network of family members, friends, neighbors, and community institutions to assist with raising their children. How do low-income African American parents raise troubled youth in disadvantaged communities when there are few resources of social support to draw upon? What strategies do parents use when they have exhausted and depleted their social capital? Drawing on three years of ethnographic field observations and multiple in-depth interviews with parents of pre-delinquent African American boys, this article examines how African American parents living in an impoverished African American community in New York City rely on the juvenile justice system, particularly juvenile confinement, as a parenting strategy. The findings suggest the need for alternatives to juvenile confinement and additional social support resources that can assist parents with parenting troubled youth.

Factors associated with the motivation to use psychoactive substances and the motivation to change in adolescents in an authoritarian context

The use of psychoactive substances (alcohol and drugs) by young people placed in rehabilitation centers in Quebec is well documented, but their motivation to use and to change substance use behavior remains unknown. There has been very little research on the details of the change process in adolescents, and even less in adolescents under supervision in rehabilitation centers.The present study aimed to identify the factors that youth associate with their motivation to use psychoactive substances and the factors that they associate with their motivation to change. Twenty-seven young males (age 14–18years) were interviewed in the Centre jeunesse de Montreal. The majority of the participants were able to identify motivations to use and to change their substance use behavior. The motivations to use differed depending on the type of substance and the surrounding context in which drug use occurs. The motivations to change were associated with substance-related problems and with the perceived effect of external factors (e.g. constraints) on substance use. Finally, neither the motivations to use nor the motivations to change were strongly associated with the closely supervised setting in which the youth found themselves. Thus the controlled environment of the Centre jeunesse appears to have facilitated the change process for some participants and had no impact on others. The implications of these results for substance-abuse interventions involving troubled youth are discussed.

Constructing the rural in education: the case of Outback Kids in Australia

The majority of the still limited literature on education in non-metropolitan areas adopts an understanding of rurality as a fixed and known geographic entity. This paper departs from such a functionalist perspective to explore how rurality is constructed in a programme for at-risk teenagers in remote Australia. Drawing on a range of texts about the programme, including a documentary series entitled Outback Kids, we examine how the rural space is imagined as simultaneously therapeutic and disciplining and therefore appropriate for troubled youth. Alongside this discussion we map the way in which other qualities and values associated with bifurcated definitions of the rural as a place of tradition and authenticity, and the urban as a place of disorder and pretence, are engaged in the texts to endorse the programme and its practices.

Emotionally Troubled Teens’ Help-Seeking Behaviors

Many school-based suicide prevention programs do not show a positive impact on help-seeking behaviors among emotionally troubled teens despite their being at high risk for suicide. This study is a secondary analysis of the Surviving the Teens(®) program evaluation to determine its effect on help-seeking behaviors among troubled youth. Results showed significant increases in mean scores of the Behavioral Intent to Communicate with Important Others Regarding Emotional Health Issues subscale (p < .0005) from pretest to 3-month follow-up. There was a significant increase (p = .006) in mean scores of the Behavioral Intent Regarding Help-Seeking Behaviors when Suicidal subscale from pretest to posttest, but not at 3-month follow-up. Also, there was a significant increase (p = .016) in mean scores in the item "I would tell an adult if I was suicidal" from pretest to 3-month follow-up. These findings suggest that the Surviving the Teens program has a positive effect on help-seeking behaviors in troubled youth.

The Subjective Experience of Being Medicated in Troubled Youth: A Sample from Residential Treatment

The use of psychotropic medications in youth has significantly increased in recent years. Moreover, the use of multiple medications, or polypharmacy, has seen a corresponding increase. The use of medications is largely based on diagnostic impressions and the targeted symptom. However, due to the dearth of applied research with severely troubled youth, there is very little “evidence base” to guide this practice. The Survey of Adolescent Treatment Experience study surveyed youth, currently placed in residential care, on their impressions of medication effectiveness on a wide-range of symptom categories. Youth report only mediocre effectiveness in their medication across a range of symptom questions. Approximately one third of youth indicated that they felt positive about taking medications. On average, slightly less than 50 % of youth reported benefits from medications across symptom categories. It is argued that these findings should inform the efforts toward individualized treatment models.

Anti-social youth? Disruptions in care and the role of ‘behavioral problems’

Abstract This paper explores the mechanisms behind the disturbingly high occurrence of placement disruption among young people in out-of-home care. Discussions have usually been framed in a vocabulary of risk and protection, with the bulk of research designed for singling out factors that correlate with stability and discontinuity in care arrangements. From this research tradition, we have learned that ‘behavioral problems’ are by far the strongest predictor for disruptions in care. By exploring the quality of care as experienced by young people themselves, this study suggests an alternative strategy. Findings suggest that disruptions occur as a result of complex social relations, as when young people struggle to fit in among other troubled youth in demanding residential settings. The paper concludes that labels such as ‘behavioral problems’ may have a reifying effect that individualizes the problem of care disruption while not being particularly helpful in explaining the phenomenon.