Living on the Razor's Edge: Solution-Oriented Brief Family Therapy with Self-Harming Adolescents [Hardcover]

Matthew D. Selekman (Author), Bill O'Hanlon (Author, Foreword)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0393703355 | ISBN-13: 978-0393703351 | Publication Date: January 2002 | Edition: 1

This text aims to provide therapists with a practice-orientated guidebook for working with self-harming adolescents, a growing and challenging treatment population. It presents a flexible client-informed solution-brief family therapy model for self-harming adolescents that integrates the best elements of solution-focused, narrative, postmodern, strategic, cognitive and expressive therapy approaches with Native American healing methods and rituals. Numerous connection-building therapeutic experiments and rituals are presented for helping to foster closer and more meaningful relationships between parents and adolescents. Many of the therapeutic techniques and strategies presented in this volume are empirically supported by research on adolescent development, protective factors of resilient children and adolsecents and treatment outcome studies. The book contains case examples and interview transcripts of culturally diverse clients. The text also demonstrates how to do one-person family therapy with adolescents where conjoint family work proved to be futile due to serious parental or marital difficulties, a lack of family support or to better meet the developmental needs of the adolescents. "Living on the Razor's Edge" presents a practical and comprehensive multi-systemic family assessment framework to guide therapists in determining at what systems levels to target interventions. Another feature of this work is Selekman's "Stress-Busters' Leadership" group. This eight-session, skill-building psycho-educational group was specifically designed to meet the unique needs of self-harming adolescents and can be implemented in any school or treatment setting.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Model for self-harming adolescents that integrates elements of solution-focused, narrative, postmodern, strategic, cognitive, and expressive therapy approaches with Native American...methods and rituals. (Family Therapy)

About the Author

Matthew D. Selekman has a private practice and provides family therapy training and consultation in Evanston, Illinois.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (January 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393703355
• ISBN-13: 978-0393703351
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,676,005 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Clarification re. Personality Disorders in Teens, November 19, 2004

By 

Mimi Cogswell "Mimi Cogswell, MS, LPC" (Portland, Oregon) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Living on the Razor's Edge: Solution-Oriented Brief Family Therapy with Self-Harming Adolescents (Hardcover)

This note is being written in defense of this book, which I and other fellow peers who work with adolescents in crisis found to be quite insightful and useful. I agree with the author that it is not appropriate to give a Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) diagnosis to a teen. At the most, I would give "traits of BPD", but at this developmental stage it is truly impossible to say with certainty that a client is personality disordered.

As per DSM-IV-TR, Fourth Edition (APA), pg. 687 of Personality Disorders under Specific Culture, Age and Gender Features reads: "Personality Disorder categories may be applied to children or adolescents in those relatively unusual instances in which the individual's particular maladaptive personality traits appear to be pervasive, persistent, and unlikely to be limited to a particular developmental stage or an epiosde of an Axis I disorder. It should be recognized that the traits of a Personality Disorder that appear in childhood will often not persist unchanged into adult life. To diagnose a Personality Disorder in an individual under 18 years, the features must have been present for at least 1 year."

7 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Dangerous Arrogance, November 23, 2003

By 

Edward Kelly (Fargo, ND United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Living on the Razor's Edge: Solution-Oriented Brief Family Therapy with Self-Harming Adolescents (Hardcover)

This book continues the unscientific and simplistic family systems theory that claims that all psychological problems are the fault of the family and never the individual, and as usual, simply dismiss psychiatric disorders. Self-mutilation is most closely associated with borderline personality disorder. The author claims the DSM-IV does not allow diagnosis of personality disorders under 18 (not true). It is true that many adolescent females "copycat" the cutting of other adolescents, but the one they are copying likely has a borderline personality disorder (and consequently a great deal of skill at manipulating others). The person with the personality disorder needs far more than brief family therapy, and the copycat should not have their family blamed but instead be kept away from the borderline they are copying. And it is critical to separate the two phenomenon. The author provides no research data to back up his claims, only a few carefully chosen cases. Family systems has much to offer as an adjunctive therapy, and sometimes as a primary therapy, but like chiropractors, they need to stop claiming to be able to explain and cure everything because in the process they discredit themselves and do damage to many of the people they try to uniformly apply their theory and therapy to. This book continues that unfortuante legacy.