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，代表了将行为医学化的趋势。随着这一发展，少年司法系统中的美国青年受到了更多的精神病学审查，越来越多的人被诊断患有这些疾病。很少有学者研究精神疾病和青少年拘留问题，更少有人专门研究女孩，她们的经历可能是独一无二的。本研究提出了三个关键问题的过程和经验的精神病诊断女性青年法院下令住院治疗纽约。首先，这些诊断类别的历史是什么，它们的历史如何与针对犯罪和贫困有色人种青年的心理健康干预措施的发展并行？ 第二，少年司法把关人如何使用这些诊断（或可能提出质疑）来确定和标记来自特定背景的青年为“有问题”？第三，青年、他们的家庭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，然后与心理学和社会学中的病理学和犯罪学工作相结合。透过参与式观察、访谈青少年、其监护人、治疗中心工作人员，以及个案档案研究，搜集资料以阐明精神科诊断在这个社区是如何被指派、经历和重新表述的，这些资料对青少年司法和公共卫生有实际的意义。不能低估了解心理健康和疾病如何与少年司法系统相互作用的重要性，特别是当这一群体是不成比例的少数群体和来自社会最低的社会经济阶层时。此外，随着被拘留的女青年人数的增加，决策者必须了解这一群体不断变化的面貌，并考虑女性异常行为被纳入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.