Psychology Work with Teenagers - Essay Example

I am sure there are a variety of programs that would need help with teens. I would like to concentrate on teenagers who are in treatment programs and who want to create a better life for themselves. I believe that identifying teens who are ready to work on their problems is beneficial to the community and to my work. I would like to help teens get involved in their communities and in communities across the world where they too could see that they were making a difference.

            In my work with teenagers, I have seen that many are just looking for ways to be important. They want to have goals but they do not really understand how to make them on their own. With the help of adults, I think that teens can structure a life that provides them with satisfying work. One way to get to this is through a part-time job or a part-time volunteer activity. I am also a mother of two girls and I feel that having my girls involved in community opportunities brings them an understanding that other teens like themselves may not have as much as they do. In some situations, this has been a very humbling experience for my girls.

            Marsella (1998) suggests that the world is getting smaller and those areas that were considered global in the past are becoming more local because of our ability to travel. To me, this means that we have so many people coming into our country that it is now imperative that everyone learns more about different cultures. Marsella calls for a global psychology that would be “concerned with, understanding, assessing, and addressing the individual and collective psychological consequences of global events and forces by encouraging and using multicultural, multidisciplinary, multisectoral, and multinational knowledge, methods, and interventions” (p. 1284). Although this is a long definition, I believe that Marsella is simply saying that we as counselors and psychologists will need to understand many different ways that we can help clients. As an example, one global event that is happening now is the problems in Libya. This may not be much of a concern for everyone, but for those of us who have friends living in our community who are Libyan women, we will have a better understanding of what Gadafi is doing to the women of that community. If we had clients from Libya, we would have to understand the culture and how we could help these women identify the feelings they were having about the situation.

            An area of concern for me in working with teens is the area of addiction. I find that there are so many children who feel they are lost that they turn to addiction as a way to just get through the day. I believe that our society has helped to disenfranchise these children by making them think that they have to be perfect to live a good life. I want to help them understand that they have skills and abilities that are valuable to society and that they can use them to help themselves and others. I think the way to address this in my MS degree is to counsel teens and help them gain an understanding of their lives and what they can do to improve them. I understand that we cannot truly change anyone unless they want to have that change, but we can be conduits to help them find the changes they want.

When working with teenagers one of the first issues that come to mind is the area of confidentiality. As counselors, we are supposed to keep all records and conversations confidential between clients and counselors. However, teenagers are usually under age and part of the confidentiality would be to achieve the confidence of parents to allow their children to have counseling.  Because most teens are underage, their parents would have to sign a consent form to allow them to have counseling. The APA does not specifically point out confidentiality where it applies to children or teens. The ACA Ethical Guidelines specifically address the responsibility that counselors have to parents or legal guardians. These guidelines suggest that the counselor must establish a collaborative relationship with families and legal guardians.

            Prilleltensky (1997) suggests that psychologists must consider the moral implications of our practices. Although this seems interesting to think about, it would seem that we all have different ideas of what morals are and what values we (and others) should live by. The question of morals with teenagers would seem to me to be that we pick those interventions and counseling practices that are appropriate to use with teenagers. I liked the list that Prilleltensky gives because it does help the counselor think about what they are doing and whether what they are doing is using sound psychological principles. O’Neill (2005) suggests that “the way we look at problems affects how we study them and try to solve them” (p. 13). This means that each of us looks at problems in different ways and if we did not have theories that we could use to help clients, we would have several different ways of attempting to help them. When working with teens, it is important to have a variety of skills in counseling so that we understand what we can do to help individual teens. We need to have theories that relate to teens as well as interventions that have been used with them. Otherwise, we are not able to effectively help them.