Adolescence Now: Understanding and Supporting Today’s Adolescent

Westminster School and the Brent Centre for Young People Present:

Adolescence Now: Understanding and Supporting Today’s Adolescent

Saturday 22nd June 9.30am - 5:15pm

Westminster School and the Brent Centre are pleased to be holding a joint conference on Adolescence.

Using a psychoanalytic lens, the conference will seek to examine the themes, preoccupations, and clinical considerations of adolescence today. Presentations will explore themes such as race, the virtual world, the gendered body, fostering development in adolescents with autism and learning difficulties and assessing adolescent difficulties.

The conference will be of interest to therapists/counsellors working with young people, school therapists/counsellors, SENDCOs, Head Teachers, DSLs, or anyone responsible for supporting the wellbeing of young people who are trained in, or interested in, psychoanalytic models of therapy.

Presenters:

Adolescence in a Changing World: The Pupils of Westminster School

‘Meeting the mental health needs of adolescents today; the nature and significance of the assessment for psychotherapy’, Dr Andrew Browne and Fiona Henderson (Child and Adolescent Psychotherapists, Westminster School)

Anna Freud said that psychotherapeutic work with adolescents is a “hazardous venture from beginning to end”. Over time, these “hazards” and complexities have led to substantial developments in how child psychotherapists think and practice clinically. The speakers draw on Andrew Browne’s doctoral research, as well as their experience of providing a contemporary psychotherapeutic service at Westminster School, to discuss how we assess and engage young people today.

The process of racialisation and the adolescent mind: undoing the mask of piety, Dr Anthony Ogoe, Child & Adolescent Psychotherapist

Race is by design a relational process. It is an indelible part of the fabric of the modern capital world, and serves a function for defining the normative human. At present, institutional life is caught in a moment of seeing race as a problem to solve. Very often mechanisms like EDI lead us to feel perpetually paralysed in the search of a solution. When seen this way, race remains an enigmatic morality test. Here, the inflexibility of the adult world is passed on to young people: beliefs which are accepted with unthinking conventional reverence - a mask of piety.

I present here a must to continually remind ourselves of the fundamentals of racialisation, to ensure space for analytic relational thought with the adolescents we work with. I believe we are collectively losing the art of being vulnerable, of not knowing. I hope to illustrate how allowing oneself to inhabit unknown territory, much like the baby we often come to observe, is in the service of development. We must be with the genesis of racialisation, to observe it, move within it, without desire for resolution. I argue the technical importance of the racialised language we use and the focus on intersubjective process as vital for supporting both ourselves and the adolescents we work with to recognise and make sense of their yearning to be human.

The Virtual World and the Gendered Body, Dr Sara Flanders, Psychoanalyst (Brent Centre for Young People)

Sara Flanders will explore the contrasting uses made of the virtual world by two highly conflicted adolescents. One finding in the virtual space of gaming, a transitional space in which to play, to explore her embattled struggle with living her own life, owning her sexual body, knowing her gender, the gaming world eventually helping to create a bridge to the world of reality. For another, the internet sucks her into a disembodied and eventually, psychotic withdrawal.

'Now you see me, now you don't': Supporting adolescent development in psychotherapy with young people with autism and learning difficulties', Felicity Tyson, Child & Adolescent Psychotherapist (Brent Centre for Young People) & Shanice Richards, Dramatherapist (Respond)

How do we keep the developmental process of adolescence alive in our minds and in the minds of other professionals when we are working with young people with autism and learning difficulties? When early trauma has shaped how young people relate to the world and the world relates to them, how do we help nurture their adolescent development or help them back on to a developmental track? Felicity Tyson, Child & Adolescent Psychotherapist (BCYP) and clinical supervisor at Respond and Shanice Richards, Dramatherapist and Young People’s Therapist at Respond, will present their findings based on experiences of clinical supervision, case management and clinical work with young people.

Panel Discussion & Closing Plenary:

‘Bridging the Gap’ – A panel discussion leading reflection on work with adolescents and the issues raised in the conference

Lunch, coffee and tea will be provided as part of the event. For more information, please contact [email protected].

Host or Publisher Westminster School and the Brent Centre for Young People