The Aggressive Adolescent (Clinical and Forensic Issues) - 9780789009104

Maximize your effectiveness with troubled kids!

The Aggressive Adolescent: Clinical and Forensic Issues provides mental health professionals with a comprehensive text that covers both theoretical and practical applied knowledge of aggressive youth in a specific, problem-focused way. Through case histories and practical treatment interventions, this unique book will give you information to help you provide improved services to adolescents who have experienced neglect, physical abuse, and/or sexual abuse. The Aggressive Adolescent offers you a new model for practical and functional assessment, treatment, planning, and service delivery for aggressive youths. The book also explores legal and forensic issues that frequently accompany these cases to bring you insight into the whole picture surrounding problem adolescents.

Compelling and comprehensive, The Aggressive Adolescent shows you how some behaviors once attributed to mental illness are now seen as criminal, and how this view is pushing mentally ill youths into the criminal justice system. This vital guide will help you, as a mental health professional, to bolster your understanding of forensic mental health issues and effectively assist in criminal justice settings.

The Aggressive Adolescent will help you become a better, more connected youth care worker. You will learn:

• to see institutionalized adolescents as whole people rather than focusing on a single characteristic such as violent behavior
• to understand that these adolescents share common needs, desires, and aspirations with their therapists, and that you can use these commonalities to give you a connection that will facilitate their therapy
• to see that traditional methods of intervention are often inappropriate or ineffective for aggressive adolescents
• to address issues of risk assessment, malpractice, and liability, to help ensure fiscal and legal accountability
  
  The Aggressive Adolescent presents strategies for dealing with youths who are resistant to entering into treatment so that you can help them deal with their problems. This essential book will assist you in developing and implementing effective systems of care for aggressive adolescents in order to give them the help and support they need.