Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
A practicing psychiatrist discusses the "forgotten" diagnosis of arrested development in teenagers, and how it is useful in practice and treatment today.
Synopsis
An Unchanged Mind begins with a clinical riddle: Why are American teenagers failing to develop normally through adolescence? We are presented with case studies from a therapeutic boarding school for troubled teenagers: All new students had been deemed treatment -failures- after conventional psychiatric care. All were bright teenagers, full of promise, not obviously -ill.- Yet they found themselves unprepared for the challenges of modern adolescence and inevitably failed--at school, at home, and among their peers socially.
An Unchanged Mind is the discovery of the essence of this problem--disrupted maturation and resulting immaturity. The book explains the problem carefully, with a brief review of normal development and an examination of the delays today's teenagers are suffering: the causes of those delays and how they produce a flawed approach to living. There is a solution. With a sustained push to help troubled kids catch up, symptoms abate, academic and interpersonal functioning improve, and parents pronounce their teens miraculously recovered. This remedy is not a matter of pharmacology--and the cure is not in pills. The remedy is, instead, to grow up.