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This monograph is a compilation of papers written by members of staff of Brent Adolescent Centre (formerly Brent Consultation Centre) on the suicidal adolescent and the proceedings of a conference held in 1993 devoted to this topic. I must confess that having worked at the Centre for a number of years it is difficult to provide a dispassionate review when much of what I have learned about working with troubled adolescents, including suicidal adolescents, was at the ‘knees’ of Moses and Egle Laufer. However, I hope I am able to suspend this closeness to the authors for the sake of the review.
The book is timely. The increase of psychosocial disorders in young people has recently been documented in an authoritative volume of research findings edited by . Diekstra, Kienhorst and de Wilde (1995) show that the rate of suicide and attempted suicide in young people increased between the early 1950s and the early 1980s, that in the last decade suicide rates in young men have continued to rise and those in young women have remained stable. The rates for attempted suicide have fallen, although there is a debate about whether the observed decline in attempted suicide is an artefact due to the underreporting of attempted suicide to medical agencies. Certainly my own clinical experience and that of the Brent Adolescent Centre and other similar agencies would suggest that there has been anything but a decline in attempted suicide and deliberate self-harm.
The Suicidal Adolescent is devoted to the clinical issues concerned with adolescents who present with suicidal behaviour seen from a psychoanalytic perspective. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1, ‘Work with Adolescents at Risk’, comprises six chapters dealing with different