Psychotherapy with Adolescent Girls

When I was getting my medical and psychiatric training in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the model of normal and deviant adolescent development was the white male. This was not surprising, since for every clinical or psychological study of adolescent girls done during the past 2 decades, there were seven studies on adolescent males. This tremendous discrepancy in actual clinical and research data between male and female adolescents led to the following myths: (1) Female adolescents are different only biologically from their male peers; they have similar psychosocial problems; (2) Adolescent girls have not been studied because their problems are not worth studying; (3) Studying adolescent girls might be dangerous to either the patient or therapist, or to both. In relation to the third myth, male psychotherapists were told that they should not treat female adolescent patients because erotic inter­ play could develop, which would be harmful to the patient and per­ haps impossible to resolve. Many clinics in the United States had a rule that young adolescent girls could not be treated by male therapists. It was thus difficult for girls to obtain treatment-for most therapists were males. It also intensified the feelings among parents, teachers, v vi Foreword community leaders, and the girls themselves that perhaps female adolescents were not worth treating.