Adolescence in Crisis: An Independent Psychoanalytic Approach to Adolescent Mental Health
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : February 2026
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 344
- Category :
Forthcoming - Category 2 :
Child and Adolescent Studies - Catalogue No : 98419
- ISBN 13 : 9781032972237
- ISBN 10 : 1032972238
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Adolescence in Crisis: An Independent Psychoanalytic Approach to Adolescent Mental Health offers a cultural and theoretical examination of the seemingly omnipresent and ever-growing mental health difficulties that teenagers face today.
The book starts by grounding the reader in a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective on adolescent development, exploring the adolescent mental health crisis as it is experienced today. Integrating psychoanalytic and sociocultural perspectives, it explores adolescent crisis and risk-taking behaviours, including suicidality, overdose, and self-harm by cutting. The book then outlines practical ways of working with the adolescent, along with their parents, carers, and educators. Core themes present throughout the chapters include the primacy of identity and belonging in adolescence and the impact of the external world on internal emotional reality, such as peer relations, the media and internet, family, and wider political and social realities.
Reviews and Endorsements
This book provides a most welcome and admirable addition to the Independent series and should reach audiences far beyond those already involved in offering psychologically informed treatment to troubled adolescents. In a way that is often scholarly but always accessible it considers adolescence from many different viewpoints, offering new ideas about risk, self-harming behaviours and how to help the young person and their families engage with those offering services in a way that enhances their capacity to think and be less destabilised by the struggles of adolescence. The authors state ‘Psychoanalytic work in this field requires two things that at first glance appear opposite: immediacy and depth’. The ideas contained in this book, brought vividly to life through composite vignettes, show this principle in action. While taking a wider, systemic approach, recognizing that culture, language, and social pressures shape the form crises take, this book is firmly rooted in psychoanalytic thinking, yet many of the chapters will also be inspirational to those working with adolescents in a wide variety of settings.
Dr Janine Sternberg, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist
This is psychoanalytic psychotherapy at its best – creative, grounded in clinical experience and grappling with the many urgent problems that adolescents bring to the clinician. The papers are written in the main by psychoanalytic child and adolescent psychotherapists who draw on the Independent psychoanalytic tradition to develop new ways of working. The urgency of the risk laden problems that their patients bring to the consulting room, make the depth of understanding and experience that come from the psychoanalytic tradition all the more significant.
These are clinicians working within the severely overloaded Child and Adolescent Mental Health interdisciplinary teams of our times, but still managing to find new ways of helping their patients and their families.
This ground-breaking collection of papers is a major contribution to clinical practice which will be enormously helpful to clinicians for many years to come.
Monica Lanyado, Ph.D., Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I
1. Adolescence at the intersection of inner and outer realities – a conceptualisation
2. The search for identity: working therapeutically with adolescents in crisis
3. “Too late for me”: the adolescent mental health crisis in time
Part II
4. Considering crisis and risk in psychoanalytic work with adolescents
5. Meaning of adolescent overdose
6. The multifaceted meanings of a symptom: A psychoanalytic exploration of self-harm in contemporary culture
7. Moving towards a psychonalyitc formulation when assessing the risk of suicide in adolescents in crisis
Part III
8. Reconfiguring Adolescent-Parent Psychotherapy: Empowering relational dynamics to promote adolescent health and growth
9. Reaching for the Unreachable: Working with Parents of Adolescents who struggle to engage
10. Working with schools to support adolescents in crisis
11. Ripples of containment: How CAMHS teams manage anxiety in the midst of adolescent crisis
12. Cries in Crisis: Holding Looked-After Adolescents and their Networks in Mind
Part IV
13. Brief Psychodynamic Psychotherapy for Adolescents and their Families in Crisis: a pilot study
14. Playing with fire; or: how do we play when we’re scared?: The nature and function of play in psychotherapy with high-risk adolescents
15. ‘To Dream is to Live’: The therapist’s function for representation in work with at risk adolescents
About the Editor(s)
Maria Papadima is a child and adolescent psychotherapist based in London, UK. She trained at the British Psychotherapy Foundation (IPCAPA) and works with an NHS crisis adolescent team in London.
Rachel Acheson is a child and adolescent psychotherapist based in London, UK. She trained at the Independent Psychoanalytic Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Association (IPCAPA).
Nikolaos Tzikas is a child and adolescent psychotherapist based in Athens, Greece. He trained at the Independent Tradition at the British Psychotherapy Foundation (IPCAPA), and is a member of the Association of Child Psychotherapists (ACP) and of the Hellenic Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Society.
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