Safety assessment in schools: beyond risk: the role of child psychiatrists and other mental health professionals.

This article presents an overview of a comprehensive school safety assessment approach for students whose behavior raises concern about their potential for targeted violence. Case vignettes highlight the features of 2 youngsters who exemplify those seen, the comprehensive nature of the assessment, and the kind of recommendations that enhance a student's safety, connection, well-being; engage families; and share responsibility of assessing safety with the school.

Parent-child connections: the essential component for positive youth development and mental health, safe communities, and academic achievement.

A continuing parent-youth bond throughout adolescence and young adulthood is the foundation for genuine emotional health, academic achievement, and healthy developmental trajectories and the antidote to youth violence.

Male adolescent rites of passage: positive visions of multiple developmental pathways.

Unlike the separation-based, stereotyped views of boys' developmental movement into adulthood, this paper will argue that there are more modern and relational models, as well as multiple pathways, for young males to journey through such rites of passage. Indeed, it will be suggested and supported by both qualitative and quantitative data that the more classic models depend on a "boy code" of traumatic separation from mother and the feminine, a process that is not only negative rather than positive in its developmental trajectory, but also likely to create a premature traumatic separation, leaving boys at risk for emotional maladjustment, everyday sadness, increased incidence of depression and the potential for violence toward the self, suicide, as well as violence toward others. More-positive visions and versions of male rites of passage will be posited and described. The definition of emotional "resilience" during this significant period will be re-addressed as one of "healthy vulnerability," sustained through connection to loving adults, rather than a classic belief in stoicism and release from relational ties. Attachment theory will be brought to bear and the desperate yearnings of adolescent males not only for connection to adult mentors, but also for non-romanticized friendships with adolescent females, will be discussed. Finally, the understanding and substitution of these new, more positive, developmental pathways will be linked to the prevention of violence.

Relational psychoanalytic treatment for young adult males.

The clinical treatment of an adolescent young adult male is presented to both illustrate and operationalize the author's hypothesis that a new model of relational psychoanalytic treatment is likely to have beneficial effects, particularly among this population. The contention that males as young boys undergo a normative trauma of premature separation in our society, which is likely to give rise to underdiagnosed abandonment depressive syndromes in teenage boys, is argued. It is represented that psychotherapists attempting to diagnose and treat a wide rage of disorders in young males would do well to rethink their approach from this new perspective.