Understanding troubled teens is not child's play

MIND MOVES:LATELY, YOUNG people have come to our attention for the wrong reasons. Reports of severe bullying, antisocial behaviour and suicide have assaulted our collective consciousness and left us reeling. Something is wrong, and we, adults entrusted with their care, feel helpless and scared.

While many of this generation are growing up with a self-assuredness that was the exception rather than the rule in times past, many seem to be running with the wrong crowd, frustrating their families and the general community. We want to understand, to impose limits, but we're failing abysmally to respond to the challenges these young people present.

Working as a therapist, I saw many young people who brought into the clinical situation a history of delinquency, dangerous behaviour (towards themselves and others) and emotional turmoil.

By the time they arrived in my office, they had invariably accumulated a long list of charges against them and an even longer list of clinical diagnoses. At first glance, their behaviours suggested negative destructive personality tendencies that would be impervious to any intervention. What I found was that they had a different story to tell.

My time with them was most successful when I listened to their stories and accepted that their behaviour made sense to them because it solved other problems in their lives. Without this understanding, and blinded by the bias that comes with age, it is easy to misunderstand the behaviour of these "problem" youths and remain at the margins of their lives.

We need to open our eyes and appreciate that our young people are attempting to navigate emotional waters that are much more troubled and chaotic than they were for earlier generations. For example, in a recent day-long workshop I conducted with 38 teenagers (12- to 17-year-olds), I asked them how many people they knew who had taken their own lives.

The final tally revealed that, collectively, they knew 65 individuals who had died in this way. Why, I wondered, would they not think of suicide when bullying or emotional and physical abuse in their own homes became overwhelming for them?

Equally, we might do well to consider how easy it can be for any adolescent to resort to antisocial behaviour in the absence of clear boundaries to "hold" them through periods of turmoil. Particularly at times when the raw energies of emerging sexuality, aggression and self-doubt, common to every teenager, become overpowering.

Research by those who have worked successfully with "high-risk" young people and their families has identified a common theme that "they play at being bad because it is the simplest way to feel good". These young people discover ways to express pain, to belong somewhere, to feel real and alive.

Searching for a positive sense of identity, many young people rely on their peers to nurture and maintain an identity which is positive, powerful and accepted. In these groups, they feel greater self-esteem and learn better survival skills than they do from adults in their lives.

In many cases, their parents are preoccupied with their own difficulties, or are disempowered by a society that keeps telling them they have failed; they are not available to them in any helpful way.

Our children and young people need us if they are to make sense of the chaos they encounter daily. Our role as adults is to provide an environment where they feel "held" and supported through tough times, and to guide them in making good choices in their lives.

To engage meaningfully with them, we need to start listening carefully, and recognise that dangerous, delinquent, deviant and disordered children are in a frantic search to find some ways to feel good about themselves.

In short, their behaviours are their chosen ways of finding mental health.

If we recognise this, we find ourselves in a better position to appreciate why they feel compelled to act out and to provide them with skills and opportunities to experience life in an equally exciting but more acceptable way.

Part of the problem is that as adults we've lost our nerve with young people. We react to them by throwing up our arms in helpless submission when what they need more than ever is that we stand our ground and provide them with a safe context to grow through their confusion.

As long as we back away, or resort to labelling them in whatever way gives us the illusion that we are in control, we fail them. We leave them to turn their inner confusion into destructive behaviours, directed at others - or, tragically, to turn their inner despair against themselves.

Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong - The National Centre for Youth Mental Health (headstrong.ie). tbates@irish-times.ie