Helping Your Troubled Teen: Learn to Recognize, Understand, and Address the Destructive Behavior of Today’s Teens


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Well researched book is helpful for parents

“Helping Your Troubled Teen: Learn to Recognize, Understand, and Address the Destructive Behavior of Today’s Teens”
Edited by Cynthia S. Kaplan, Ph.D.,
Blaise A. Aguirre, M.D., and
Michael Rater, M.D.
Fair Winds Press
Beverly, Mass. 2007

By Paul Efthim, Ph.D.

In today's difficult publishing marketplace, self-help books are one of the few profitable categories. Sadly, this has led to a proliferation of guides peddling quick cures and instant karma.

Patients frequently ask for book recommendations in the course of their therapies. I have become increasingly reluctant to suggest titles to patients for several reasons.

One reason is that a request for a self-help book in the context of therapy needs to be understood as a potential signal about the therapy itself, perhaps a message from the patient that "I'm needing more here" or a question of "Do you know what you're doing? Find me an expert." Suggesting books to patients can at times be experienced as an emotional abandonment - "Here, Mr. Jones, go read this, take two aspirin and I'll see you next Tuesday."

Another reason for caution in recommending self-help books is the often poor quality of the material. This seems especially true in the area of books on children and teens.

A group of writers based at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. has produced a sober, well-researched overview of mental health issues for teens that provides good information for parents while avoiding hyperbole and false promises.

"Helping Your Troubled Teen: Learn to Recognize, Understand, and Address the Destructive Behavior of Today's Teens" consists of twelve chapters edited by three leaders of the Adolescent Residential Services program at McLean: psychologist Cynthia Kaplan and psychiatrists Blaise Aguirre and Michael Rater. They are joined by McLean-affiliated contributors Roya Ostovar, Ken Sklar, Michael Hollander, Richard Falzone, Thomas Weigel, Ben Molbert, Sue Mandelbaum-Cohen, Lisa Lambert, and Joseph Gold.

The McLean perspective offers a window into the world of adolescent inpatient and residential treatment as well as the more usual outpatient settings. This means we meet some extraordinarily troubled young people, which might be frightening for some parents.

Each chapter corresponds to a different problem area: depression, cutting, substance use, eating disorders, delinquency, issues regarding technology, parents as part of the recovery process, parents as advocates and working with pediatricians and teachers in the diagnostic process. There is a chapter on adolescent development as well as a lovely collection of seven first-person stories of recovery written by the teens themselves.

Parents will find dozens of case examples to help place their own child's behavior in context. Relevant research and clinical wisdom are sprinkled throughout the text. One statistic was particularly startling: self-injurious behavior affects between 14 and 39 percent of all adolescents. That translates to potentially one in three teens having engaged in cutting or some other form of self-injury, a rate much higher than I would have expected.

There is no lack of advice for parents. Most chapters have a bullet-pointed list outlining what parents should and should not do in the face of problem behavior. The authors politely point out how distracted parents can become and how many early warning signs are missed in many families even where parents may seem attentive.

The book spends little time on topics such as anxiety and ADHD. For a book that tries to survey the territory of adolescent mental health, some areas simply cannot be covered in sufficient depth. However, there are ample references and resources for further reading.

"Helping Your Troubled Teen" is recommended for a general parent audience as a welcome "insider's guide" to adolescent mental health treatment.

Paul Efthim, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist in full-time practice in Brookline, Mass. He holds faculty appointments at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology and the Boston Institute for Psychotherapy.