Latest / Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour / The Psychology Of Adolescent Criminality. Ep 2. The Adolescent Brain Under Pressure

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The Psychology Of Adolescent Criminality. Ep 2. The Adolescent Brain Under Pressure · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome back.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is Kim Lee, Child, an adolescent psychotherapist.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: And following yesterday's episode in the series The Psychology of Adolescent Criminality, today I want to talk about the neurological implications in terms of the developing brain.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: So in the last episode, we began to explore that the behavior, as I almost always say, is or can be understood as a communication.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think another very important layer that really I don't think is understood thoroughly enough is to do with what is happening in the adolescent brain.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now this is a very important period of brain development.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: A very great deal is going on inside the brain in terms of its growth and the shedding and discarding of certain neural pathways and the development of new ones.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, this is all invisible, but it is happening.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And we can see the evidence for that in a variety of different ways: mood change, forgetfulness, needing to sleep, more heightened and more intense emotional states.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: A very good deal is going on, but it's not visible.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, it influences functioning in other ways as well.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I think something we should sort of put down as a ground or a basic understanding is that even though many adolescents know what the rules are, they understand consequences and they can explain risk, yet in the moment they still act, they still react.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because the brain isn't finished and and it's uh essentially uneven.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: The emotional systems that develop early and the reward system becomes highly active.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: But the system responsible for judgment and impulse control, long-term thinking, develops much later on.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, we see this in very young children, and we see how they move slowly from impulsivity through to a more concrete understanding and awareness because the capacity to think starts to form.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly the same happens in adolescents, but it has a different quality.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: So, what does this mean?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it means that a young person can feel things intensely, want something immediately, and act quickly.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And this happens before they can pause, think, and predict outcomes.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's quite normal.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, it can have far-reaching consequences when there are other factors involved.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And what we see is that this central part of the process of development can be compromised by many things.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: A sixteen-year-old girl was urgently referred by a court who had ordered me to work with the family.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, working under court order usually occurs when the courts have exhausted all other means of dealing with complex cases and that are concerned with family law.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, these are notoriously difficult because they tend to involve a significant number of different agencies, which could be pediatric mental health, education, social services, and sometimes the police.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now, quite how Emily had avoided detention is nothing short of a miracle.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: And when the case was was or one of the hearings occurred again, the judge, concerned in her wisdom, managed to delay criminal proceedings on the grounds that the case for mitigation was compelling and that an alternative to custody should be considered.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in those sorts of situations, my job is to conduct something of a forensic clinical examination of all of the facts and then make recommendations to the court about my findings and actions and how my clinical opinion could be applied.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in my experience, this usually results in being ordered to undertake the subsequent work that I've recommended.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: I can't always do that, and it's not something I would necessarily do on my own.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's complicated, it's arduous, and yet it's compelling.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it requires that I carefully examine huge amounts of recorded information, taking a complex family history, and this has to be very detailed and thorough.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: I interview all family members and sometimes need to have meetings with other professionals who have been involved to ascertain their involvement and see if we can have a collective understanding.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: But the motivating factor for my work always comes back to the same thing, and that is we have a young person at the centre of all of this, and it might be possible to make a difference.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I always know that such a sense of responsibility isn't something I can necessarily take full ownership of.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And quite often I find myself saying to people, I'm a clinician, not a magician.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I can I can do a lot, but I can't do everything.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Emily had been involved in county lines drug crime.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: She had been drawn into it as a consequence of numerous factors.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: She was being charged with aggravated assault and possession of class A drugs.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: She'd mugged an elderly man and made him give her his money, and she used threats of menace.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: There were two co-defendants, and this wasn't her first offense, but it was probably the most serious.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is a girl with highly acrimonious parents blaming each other and her for the situation that they were now all in.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: And somewhere in all of this, the story had been lost, and what we were left with were the headlines.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, that's true, that's what happened, but it didn't tell the story.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: So it was my job to find it and communicate it in a meaningful way that would result, hopefully, in some kind of action that would alter the course that this girl was on.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: So when she came to see me, she was dressed in a way that sort of suggested that she believed herself to be someone who must present as far older than her chronological age.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: She was wearing false eyelashes, false nails, and was perfectly manicured wearing designer clothing.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yet she greets me as if I'm just yet another intrusive adult who wants to ask her stupid questions.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: And she's seen so many people and she's sick of it.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: Being asked the same questions again and again.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: And she doesn't, as far as she's concerned, need any help.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's her parents.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: She's brittle, hostile, and and defensive.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I decide that my approach needs to be something which speaks to her at a level that she understands.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to ask her, and how did you feel about that?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because she needs someone who's not going to counsel her.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: She needs someone who's going to connect with her in a way that means something.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I start with something like, This looks a bit messy, doesn't it?
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: What do you what do you think?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: She shrugs her shoulders and I said, Do you have any thoughts about where this might go?
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, I don't know, I might get locked up.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Well, that's yeah, that's a possibility, but there are others as well.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: And she asks me if if am I like a social worker or a shrink, and I said, Well, yeah, I guess I am like a shrink.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: I love it when people use clinical terminology.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: But it essentially I'm not like the other people that she's had to talk to.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I I explain my role, but then I say, look, I I really want to understand things from your point of view, because when I see young people, quite often that's the bit that gets missed out.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure that people necessarily, particularly in cases like this, see it in a way that really helps.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: I said, You've you've been in you've been involved with drugs, you've been arrested, you have been involved with county loans.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Help me, help me understand how this has happened.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: She hesitates but begins to tell me a very animated version of the reality of her experiences, but it seems to be underpinned by, and it's probably true that nobody understands, but actually it's no big thing, and everyone is overreacting and she's not going to do it again.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'd say so you'd be amazed at the number of times I've heard that.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I guess I guess that's an easier way of seeing it, but it doesn't really tell the whole story, does it?
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: But I then say, but telling the whole story is really hard, isn't it?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Thing is, if I know the story, then maybe I can help.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Then I say, How much do you owe?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: And she looks at me immediately and says, nothing.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I say, How much have you had on tech?
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now what I'm referring to is how young people who are caught up in county lines, and not just county lines, become runners and distributors, and often they will get paid with drugs, but sometimes they have to buy them and end up owing significant amounts of money, and that has pretty dangerous consequences.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Somewhere who is higher up in the food chain and who is controlling everything is invisible, but they are the ones who benefit from this.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: She looks and says, I I don't know.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I say, You are you staying safe and out of reach?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: And she tells me it's okay, it's covered, and someone's looking after me.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: That I find troubling.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Are we talking about somebody else in the picture who may be exploiting her?
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: She's 16 and goodness only knows the threat that she lives under.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: There is a very big part of me that wants to protect her.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: I want to keep her safe.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, I listen to that part of myself because it tells me what's going on underneath, but of course I can't do that.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: But it's telling me something about what has this girl missed?
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: What is it that she was entitled to have, but she didn't?
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: So she became disenfranchised.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: She would have been involved with other groups of young people who had similar backgrounds and little by little fallen deeply into something that she couldn't possibly get out of on her own.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Do you know at any point before you got involved, did did you have any idea what you were getting into?
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: And she looked and said, I I knew it was a bad idea.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: But and I actually thought that and I said, So what happened next?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, Oh I just I just did it anyway.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't I didn't know what was going to happen, I didn't think anything would happen.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody told me we won't get caught.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now there's a really interesting thing that happened at that point because it wasn't defiance, it was a gap, and a gap between thought and action that had to do with impulse, and the gap was where regulation and pressing the pause button is supposed to be, but for her, that wasn't reliable, it didn't kick in.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: When we see rising levels of youth offending and violence or increasing arrests for serious offenses, we're not simply seeing worse behavior, we're seeing more intense emotional environments, greater exposure to risk.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Very probably family environments that unwittingly feed the psychological difficulty that the child has grown up in.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe an environment where regulation and emotional containment has been periodic at best.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: And we're seeing a brain that's biologically primed to act before it can regulate.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why we see patterns such as violent offending among young people.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: We see increased seriousness in offenses despite fewer first-time entrants.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Adolescents often live in what we might call future blindness, and what I mean by that is that consequences exist, but they don't feel real because the present dominates.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's multifactorial.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: But this is an im this is a very important central part.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bit like in development, I very often think of the different components for adolescents, and it's like a cocktail, and it can be very powerful.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: The neurological component, the identity component, the pressures, the physiological changes, social involvement, and finding your place in the world, in a in a world that doesn't really have rights of passage for adolescents.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's a cocktail.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: And like all cocktails, it if there are enough of the right ingredients, the uh result is going to be interesting.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess in a way, this is why punishment alone just fails.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: It it it really doesn't make sense.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because if behavior is driven by impulse reward and emotional intensity, then punishment doesn't build regulation, it doesn't strengthen thinking, and it doesn't necessarily reduce future risk.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: And when you think about the principle of a deterrent, in order for a deterrent to be meaningful, you have to have a brain that is sufficiently developed to be able to hold on to the notion of what that deterrent actually means as a way of regulating.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: Adolescents, well, generally speaking, that's not going to be the case.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: It can be for some.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is where the other factors are involved.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: The environment that the young person has developed in, the role of parents and other people.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: But what actually does help is the capacity to pause, the ability to reflect, and the ability to imagine consequences.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: And this is built over time, and it's built by this being demonstrated through the way in which young people are helped to essentially join the dots.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes when I work with young people, what I do, I mean they'll they'll come and say that something awful has happened and they're in trouble again, and so on.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: And what I might do is look at the the latest thing, and we go through it bit by bit.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: We we go right back to the beginning before the incident happened.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: What was happening?
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: Who was there?
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember what you were thinking and how were you feeling at that time?
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to help them rebuild the picture, and then we go through it bit by bit by bit.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then when we get to the end, I said, now let's imagine you could do it knowing what you know now, if you could do it, if you could do it all again, what would you do differently for a different outcome?
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: Every time the young person will have an answer.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: All I have done is to guide them through this and help them.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's like I they have used my capacity to make sense of things, which they then internalize.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not taking a moral stand, and I'm not expecting that just because we've done that, that there won't be a problem again.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: But what I see is bit by bit their capacity to predict outcomes, to regulate impulses, and to distance themselves or step away from situations that could be could be difficult.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Bit by bit that comes together.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: This can happen in families, but this has to do with parents working in the same way, which is something that I uh endeavor to help them do.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: The adolescent brain is powerful, but it's not balanced.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: And in that imbalance, risk can take hold.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: They're not choosing risk in the way that adults understand it, they're wired towards it before they can regulate it.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening, and I will be back with episode three, shortly.