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

破坏性行为障碍是精神病学中相对较新的分类，代表了行为医学化的趋势。与此同时，青少年司法系统中的美国青少年也受到了额外的精神检查，越来越多的青少年被诊断出患有这些障碍。很少有学者讨论精神疾病和青少年拘留问题，也很少有学者专门研究女孩，她们的经历可能是独一无二的。这项研究提出了三个关键问题，关于在纽约被法院下令住院治疗的年轻女性的精神诊断过程和经历。首先，这些诊断类别的历史是什么，它们的历史如何与针对被定罪的贫困有色人种青年的精神健康干预的发展相平行？第二，这些诊断是如何被少年司法看门人使用(或可能受到质疑)来识别来自特定背景的青少年并将其贴上“问题”的标签的？第三，年轻人、他们的家人和居住社区的其他成员如何理解、接受和/或挑战这些标签？本研究采取跨学科的方法，首先借鉴心理学和医学人类学的文献，然后结合心理学和社会学关于病理学和犯罪学的工作。通过参与者观察、与青少年及其监护人和治疗中心工作人员的访谈以及对病例记录的档案研究，将收集数据，以阐明精神疾病诊断在这个社区是如何分配、经历和重新制定的，这些数据对青少年司法和公共卫生具有实际意义。不能低估了解心理健康和疾病如何与少年司法系统交织在一起的重要性，特别是在这一人口不成比例地属于少数群体和来自社会最低社会经济阶层的情况下。此外，随着被拘留的女青年人数的增加，政策制定者必须了解这一群体不断变化的面貌，并考虑到女性越轨行为被归因于精神疾病的独特方式。

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.