{"title":"Adolescent School Shooters and Traumatic Childhood Development: Chronic Abuse, Deprivation, Isolation, and Soul Murder.","authors":"Nina E Cerfolio","doi":"10.1521/pdps.2025.53.1.61","DOIUrl":"10.1521/pdps.2025.53.1.61","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>While the roots of school violence are complex and multidetermined, the origins remain deeply embedded in our society. It is now established that there is a high prevalence of mass shooters with undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric illness. In this article case material illustrates the psychodynamic and psychosocial determinants of school shootings. Shooters typically experience loss, trauma, bullying, abandonment, and undiagnosed psychiatric illness. They are often unwanted and marginalized children living in abusive environments. This article describes the psychodynamic relevance of the concept of soul murder and emphasizes the extreme isolation and loneliness experienced by shooters. The cases described might have been prevented had the assailant, after typically being identified as \"troubled\" by secondary support systems, such as families, schools, and law enforcement officials, received appropriate psychiatric treatment. There is an urgent need for more of an interdisciplinary approach involving families, school counselors, law enforcement, mental health workers, and lawyers, with a redoubling of efforts to secure appropriate psychiatric treatment for children with mental illnesses who are marginalized and may have a higher risk of violence than the general population.</p>","PeriodicalId":38518,"journal":{"name":"Psychodynamic Psychiatry","volume":"53 1","pages":"61-78"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143651188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction to the Special Issue of Mentalization-Based Treatment with Children, Adolescents, and Families.","authors":"Efraín Bleiberg","doi":"10.1521/pdps.2024.52.4.425","DOIUrl":"10.1521/pdps.2024.52.4.425","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This introduction to the special issue on mentalization-based treatment (MBT) with children, adolescents, and families highlights a range of conceptual and clinical contributions that illustrate the richness and usefulness of applying developmental and family systems perspectives to an MBT framework to alleviate the plight of young people and their parents.</p>","PeriodicalId":38518,"journal":{"name":"Psychodynamic Psychiatry","volume":"52 4","pages":"425-434"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142830183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mentalization-Based Work with Families.","authors":"Eia Asen, Efrain Bleiberg, Peter Fonagy","doi":"10.1521/pdps.2024.52.4.563","DOIUrl":"10.1521/pdps.2024.52.4.563","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article reviews an approach to working with families that grounds in systemic thinking the framework of mentalization-based treatment. Employing a mentalizing stance, this approach aims to interrupt coercive, nonmentalizing cycles of interaction within the family system and replace them with mentalizing conversations in which epistemic trust and the shared social-emotional learning of the we-mode can be generated. The process thus promoted is a spiral of shared attention and co-mentalizing, constantly lost and then recovered, in which therapist and family members learn to hear, recognize, understand, and trust one another and repair the inevitable disruptions in mentalizing and trust that allow family members to experience a way of shared knowing- the we-mode-that they can apply to communicate and solve problems both within the family system and in the broader social systems in which the family is embedded.</p>","PeriodicalId":38518,"journal":{"name":"Psychodynamic Psychiatry","volume":"52 4","pages":"563-583"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142830192","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Author Index to Volume 52, 2024.","authors":"","doi":"10.1521/pdps.2024.52.4.607","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1521/pdps.2024.52.4.607","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38518,"journal":{"name":"Psychodynamic Psychiatry","volume":"52 4","pages":"607-610"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142830111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Recognizing Social Injustice and Epistemic Mistrust in Helping Adolescents with Multiple Needs: The AMBIT (Adaptive Mentalization-Based Integrative Treatment) Approach.","authors":"Liz Cracknell, Peter Fuggle, Dickon Bevington","doi":"10.1521/pdps.2024.52.4.584","DOIUrl":"10.1521/pdps.2024.52.4.584","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Epistemic trust-trust in the relevance and utility of social learning-is central to helping processes between clients and workers in helping services. Yet, due to their experiences, clients may <i>adaptively</i> develop predispositions toward stances of epistemic mistrust or epistemic credulity. From an AMBIT (adaptive mentalization-based integrative treatment) perspective, this article argues that epistemic mistrust and credulity are both <i>caused by</i> social injustice and <i>generate</i> further social injustice. Helping services commonly respond in ways that fail to acknowledge this social injustice and, perversely, deliver further injustice still. Our primary focus is how these issues relate to work with clients, but we argue that they are present in work within AMBIT's other foci, too: in teams, multiagency networks, and learning. We conclude that workers and helping services have a moral duty to recognize and attend to the multiple social injustices associated with epistemic mistrust and credulity.</p>","PeriodicalId":38518,"journal":{"name":"Psychodynamic Psychiatry","volume":"52 4","pages":"584-605"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142830143","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mentalization-Based Treatment for Adolescents (MBT-A).","authors":"Carla Sharp, Trudie Rossouw","doi":"10.1521/pdps.2024.52.4.542","DOIUrl":"10.1521/pdps.2024.52.4.542","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this article we describe the structure and technique of mentalization-based therapy for adolescents (MBT-A), an evidence-based intervention that has shown effectiveness in helping young people with self-harm, borderline personality, and depression. We describe also the differences between MBT with adults and MBT-A, which primarily focuses on the developmental aspects of adolescence. The developmental trajectory of adolescence culminates in a coherent and consolidated sense of self. Mentalizing provides the main supporting socio-cognitive-emotional process for achieving a coherent sense of self and, consequently, authentic and rewarding intimacy, making its evolutionary relevance clear and underscoring the importance of scaffolding this critical process during adolescence, regardless of diagnosis or therapeutic modality. We further argue that mentalization is a central mechanism by which personality functioning is achieved. In our view, mentalizing can be seen as a cross-diagnostic feature common to all personality pathology and, arguably, all psychopathology. This broadens the relevance of MBT-A beyond its original remit of self-harm and borderline personality disorder and identifies the enhancement of mentalizing and epistemic trust as a common factor in all psychotherapies that support adolescents through a challenging but critical developmental period. As such, mentalizing can be viewed as the property of all good psychotherapy.</p>","PeriodicalId":38518,"journal":{"name":"Psychodynamic Psychiatry","volume":"52 4","pages":"542-562"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142830189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Working with Parents: A Mentalization-Based Framework.","authors":"Norka T Malberg","doi":"10.1521/pdps.2024.52.4.473","DOIUrl":"10.1521/pdps.2024.52.4.473","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article presents a mentalization-based treatment (MBT) framework for working with parents that fosters the emergence of mentalization in a context grounded in relational and developmental points of view. A basic premise of this framework is that mentalization and epistemic trust provide protective factors for parents during moments of family stress, promoting the parents' capacity to negotiate the developmental tasks of parenting, as these tasks interact with both their inner world and the external realities of an ethnically and racially diverse, gendered culture.</p>","PeriodicalId":38518,"journal":{"name":"Psychodynamic Psychiatry","volume":"52 4","pages":"473-489"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142830149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mentalization-Based Treatment for Adolescent Depression.","authors":"Patrick Luyten, Saskia Malcorps, Peter Fonagy","doi":"10.1521/pdps.2024.52.4.490","DOIUrl":"10.1521/pdps.2024.52.4.490","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Depression is a very common mental health problem in adolescence. Although over the past decades a number of psychological interventions for depression in adolescence have been developed and empirically evaluated, recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses suggest that there is considerable room for improvement of their effectiveness. This is particularly true for the treatment of adolescents with \"complex\" depression, that is, those where depression is embedded within broader personality and relational problems, often related to a history of attachment trauma. Mentalization-based treatment (MBT) may be particularly effective in these cases, as it has a strong focus on temporary and long-term impairments in mentalizing (i.e., the capacity to understand the self and others in terms of intentional mental states), which are very typical of adolescents with depression. This article outlines a continuum of severity of depression as seen from a mentalizing perspective, ranging from the mild to moderate to the more severe end of the spectrum. This is followed by a summary of the mentalizing approach to understanding depression along the spectrum of severity, the empirical evidence supporting this approach, and a description of the basic principles of MBT for depression. We close with some thoughts about the future of MBT in the treatment of depression in adolescents.</p>","PeriodicalId":38518,"journal":{"name":"Psychodynamic Psychiatry","volume":"52 4","pages":"490-511"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142830186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}