Doctoral Dissertation Research: Ethnographic Perspectives on the Mental Health of Female Youth in Court-Ordered Residential Treatment

Teachers College, Columbia University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Disruptive behavior disorders are relatively recent classifications in psychiatry and represent a trend to medicalize behavior. Alongside this development, American youth within the juvenile justice system have fallen under added psychiatric scrutiny and increasingly have been diagnosed with these disorders. Few scholars have addressed mental illness and juvenile detention and fewer have studied girls specifically, whose experiences may be unique. This study asks three critical questions about the process and experience of psychiatric diagnosis among female youth court-ordered to residential treatment in New York. First, what is the history of these diagnostic categories, and how might their history parallel developments in mental health interventions that target criminalized and poor youth of color? Second, how are these diagnoses used (or potentially challenged) by juvenile justice gatekeepers to identify and label youth from particular backgrounds as "problematic"? Third, how do youth, their families, and other members of the residential community understand, embrace and/or challenge these labels? This study takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing first on literature in psychological and medical anthropology and integrated, in turn, with work on pathology and criminality in psychology and sociology. Through participant observation, interviews with youth, their guardians, and treatment center staff, and archival research on case records, data will be collected to elucidate how psychiatric diagnoses are assigned, experienced and reformulated in this community. Such data have practical implications for juvenile justice and public health. The importance of understanding how mental health and illness intersect with the juvenile justice system cannot be underestimated, particularly when this population is disproportionately minority and from the lowest socioeconomic brackets of society. Furthermore, as the number of female youth in detention rises, it is imperative that policy-makers understand the changing face of this population and consider the unique ways that female deviance is folded into mental illness.