Nurturing Hidden Resilience in Troubled Youth

Geoff Hamilton is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of
British Columbia.

Drawing on contemporary research in the field as well as his own
extensive experience as a social worker, Ungar in this book presents a
constructionist theory for the promotion of well-being in young people
who have been labelled as socially deviant, putting forward a postmodern
model of identity that emphasizes the complex discursive status of any
definition of mental health. He illustrates his approach with
comprehensive case studies that demonstrate how narrative empowerment
can take place.

Ungar’s central argument is that “[t]oo frequently we prefer to
train, correct, supervise, and control rather than understand” the
voices of troubled youth.

Part of the problem with conventional approaches to social deviance, he
persuasively demonstrates, is that the very act of record keeping by
mental health professionals can unfairly prejudge youth and constrict
the type of help offered to them: “these records create personae that
push potential caregivers away, making youth whose disruptive or violent
behaviour is only episodic, contextual, or utilitarian appear too
dangerous for informal placements.” In opposition to this tendency,
Ungar seeks to grant a more privileged status to the stories youth
construct about themselves in mental-health-care settings. This approach
reduces the marginalization of the discourses of troubled youth, and can
make it possible to begin a process of narrative empowerment as the
resilient aspects of a particular youth’s own identity constructions
are recognized and then encouraged in pro-social directions.

The case studies Ungar includes show how caregivers can encourage youth
to develop competence in interpersonal relations and gain a strong sense
of control over their personal narratives. As Ungar concludes, “To the
extent that caregivers promote this process, they will witness
increasingly more powerful and widely accepted constructions of
resilience in teens from the most challenging of backgrounds.”

This study does indeed provide a compelling theoretical framework for
such a process, as well as practical models for the fostering of
resilience in troubled youth. Nurturing Hidden Resilience in Troubled
Youth is an important contribution to the literature on the treatment of
high-risk youth.