Assessing Adolescents Who Threaten Homicide in Schools

Psychoanalytic and psychiatric perspectives on children who threaten to kill others are reviewed in the context of the need for an interdisciplinary approach to the problem. Converging technologies derived from a Psychoanalytically informed social systems model are compared to law enforcement approaches, Psychoanalytic understanding of the individual dynamics of the child, and empirical research a conduct disordered adolescents. The interdisciplinary orientation of a broadly trained community psychoanalyst allows a unique contribution when trying to distinguish adolescents who make a threat from those who pose a threat. Case vignettes are used to illustrate the hypotheses. This article is reprinted with permission of The American Society of Psychoanalysis, Volume 62, Number 3, pp. 213–235 (2002). Two of the authors (SWT & FCS), participated in a conference held by the federal Bureau of Investigation in July 1999, in which 18 schools where there had been homicides as well as thwarted attacks were invited to a weeklong conference with many national experts and FBI profilers. Well over 100 individuals attended the meeting, including school principals, counselors, deans of students, district attorneys, and members of the police force in a think tank setting to understand the psychology of school violence and, in particular of the child who commits or threatens homicide in school called by the FBI a “school shooter”.     

Trends in Adolescent Development Impacting Practice: How Can We Catch Up?

Changes in the mechanisms of communication and advances in brain imaging technology shape understanding and interpretation of the manner in which adolescents process and respond to information and relate to others. Knowledge about how trends in adolescent development should inform practice with adolescents is limited, and yet emerging trends and new discoveries have implications for adolescent relationships, behavior, and well-being. Our purpose was to critically examine the influence of major technological innovations on adolescent development and the impacts on research and practice with vulnerable adolescent populations. We discuss strategies for researchers and practitioners.     

Women's Education,Marital Violence,and Divorce: A Social Exchange Perspective

Drawing on social exchange theories, the authors hypothesized that educated women are more likely than uneducated women to leave violent marriages and suggested that this pattern offsets the negative education–divorce association commonly found in the United States. They tested these hypotheses using 2 waves of young adult data on 914 married women from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The evidence suggests that the negative relationship between women's education and divorce is weaker when marriages involve abuse than when they do not. The authors observed a similar pattern when they examined the association of women's proportional earnings and divorce, controlling for education. Supplementary analyses suggested that marital satisfaction explains some of the association among women's resources, victimization, and divorce but that marital violence continues to be a significant moderator of the education–divorce association. In sum, education appears to benefit women by both maintaining stable marriages and dissolving violent ones.     

Advice from teens to teens about dating: Implications for healthy relationships

Seventy-five Mexican American and White male and female adolescents were asked in focus groups to offer advice to other adolescents pertaining to dating relationships. Across ethnicities and sexes, “Stay on your feet” was the most prominent advice given, followed by advice to “Know when it's right”. “Have good reasoning…especially about that was a prominent theme among females; Mexican American females focused more on pressure associated with sexual activity while White females embedded their advice more often within futuristic and long-term relationship goals. Females offered roughly three times more relationship advice than did males and dialogued collaboratively at greater length, enriching their advice with personal and emotional experiences. Findings are interpreted within a developmental and feminist perspective and in line with recent recommendations for sexual and dating education as outlined by Romeo and Kelley (2009).     

Using the bridges transition framework for youth in foster care: Measurement development and preliminary outcomes

Youth in foster care often undergo multiple transitions before reaching adulthood, and these transitions often create significant stress and can exacerbate emotional and behavioral problems. A measurement instrument (the Youth Experience of Transitions, or YET) was designed to assess foster care youths' understanding of transitions, and this instrument was tested on a group of youth undergoing an intervention program designed to assist them in coping with the stress of these transitions while in foster care. The intervention was based on the Transitions Framework by William Bridges and was implemented in multiple community agencies with funding from the Andrus Family Fund. Using factor analysis, we found that the YET contained two factors representing (1) openness and (2) determination. For youth in the participating foster care programs, growth in openness from baseline to 6 months was linked to a significant decrease in internalizing symptoms; no significant links were found for externalizing symptoms. Implications for foster care intervention programs are discussed.