Annotated Bibliography on Clinical Social Work with Adolescents, Children, and Youth

Miller, L. D. (2013). I Am Not Who I Thought I Was: Use of Grief Work to Address Disrupted Identity Among Hispanic Adolescent Immigrants. Clinical Social Work Journal, 41(4), 316-323.

Millers article describes his encounter while working as a psychotherapist in a community mental health clinic. He had noted that some Latin Americans immigrates who travel to the United States are in pursuit of better living conditions. However, this a burden to young people who are subjected to a new culture and environment at a crucial stage of identity formation. As a result, immigrants teenagers tend to suffer from identity confusion and depression while resolving issues related to loss of their old identities and achievements. In this article, Miller, propose a model of grief work as a tool to help out the young immigrants to acknowledge their internal losses and manage their grief. Therefore, Miller focuses on acceptance of existence in the new environs and depth of some of these losses as a way of gradually developing a new and positive identity.

In clinical social work, integrating grief work into therapeutic intervention is important while treating psychological disorders among immigrant teenagers resolving loss and disruption of identity. However, a psychotherapist ought to develop insight into the nature of problems a patient is going through to come up with a permanent resolution. For instance, some of the factors to take into consideration and to affect the development of new identity among immigrating teens are cultural variances, immigration-related separation and attachment problems. The importance of grief work is that it promotes the development of culture according to the patients self-image and identification of his or her original culture. The model prevents an immigrant from feeling pressurized to catch up with peers with solid identities and from whom they want approval. Therefore, grief work is among the most effective tools to deal with immigrants trauma especially bearing in mind that the number of young people moving to the United States has been increasing every day.

Nadeau, L., Jaimes, A., Johnson-Lafleur, J., & Rousseau, C. (2017). Perspectives of Migrant Youth, Parents and Clinicians on Community-Based Mental Health Services: Negotiating Safe Pathways. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 1-13.

The article focuses on services on the mental health of the youth especially the migrant youth. According to the article, adequacy and accessibility of the services are alarming as very few people receive them. Collaborative care between primary care clinicians and mental health specialists aims to offer avenues for mental health care, and they address the barriers vulnerable migrant youth face when seeking mental health care. A study has been done to offer a better explanation on the quality of care for the vulnerable population as well as the factors that improve their access to care. Clinicians, parents, and youth are the informants on the qualitative study. Youth whose parents had both immigrated were involved in the study and interviews were conducted on all the participants to gather information. The study identified that the youth and their parents are particularly concerned with youth mental health settings, integration of family issues during treatment as well as how comfortable they are with the services. Clinicians emphasized the importance of institutional and inter professional support. The limitations include generalizability of the results due to a small sample size and some of the results being influenced by the characteristics of the community clinic and neighborhood where the research was conducted.

Clinical social workers have the role of offering assistance of diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of mental illness. Clinicians have been used in the study to approach and identify youths who are potential participants as they have faced challenges when seeking Youth Mental Health (YMH) services. The article is relevant to pertinent clinical social work as it focuses on seeking the issues faced by mental health victims on the services they receive. The questions that the article has raised and enabled one to understand more on include if YMH services are adequate to immigrant youth and it is clear that the immigrants have less access to these services. From the study, immigrant young people are rarely considered, and there is a need for the clinicians to offer equality to such adolescents as they deserve similar services as the other citizens.

Kolbert, J. B., Crothers, L. M., & Field, J. E. (2013). Clinical interventions with adolescents using a family systems approach. The Family Journal, 21(1), 87-94.

The article elaborates the extent Bowen Family System theory may be fused into adolescent counseling especially when family participation is not possible. The family system theory helps counselors to formulate a framework relevant for an adolescent to comprehend the magnitude family dynamics and their roles in the family impact their functioning and identity. According to the theory, there is a common ego within family boundaries from which its members both borrow and lenders themselves. Therefore, development of self-emerges from a family context rather than individual growth. The main objective of the family system theory is to help formal operational youths to have an advanced perceptive of themselves and their functions by learning about their families backgrounds. During counseling therapies where family system theory is utilized the counselor might have to learn about origin his or her patients family for several generations to differentiate their patients.

While using the family system approach for counseling adolescents those capable of formal operational thinking and undergoing conflict within their family setting are likely to benefit from scrutinizing their family systems. The process involves learning the levels at which the adolescents motivation, thinking, behaviors, and values have been influenced by their family and society. The approach mainly helps children in developing a mechanism to cope with family tensions. The treating therapy aims at identifying family patterns likely to influence the adolescents functioning and developing problem-solving skills. Also, the family system theory is beneficial in that it gives the teenagers permission, encouragement, and freedom to develop an independent worldview.

References

Kolbert, J. B., Crothers, L. M., & Field, J. E. (2013). Clinical interventions with adolescents using a family systems approach. The Family Journal, 21(1), 87-94.

Miller, L. D. (2013). I Am Not Who I Thought I Was: Use of Grief Work to Address DisruptedIdentity Among Hispanic Adolescent Immigrants. Clinical Social Work Journal, 41(4), 316-323.

Nadeau, L., Jaimes, A., Johnson-Lafleur, J., & Rousseau, C. (2017). Perspectives of Migrant Youth, Parents and Clinicians on Community-Based Mental Health Services: Negotiating Safe Pathways. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 1-13.