Identification of high-risk behaviors among victimized adolescents and implications for empirically supported psychosocial treatment.

Overview

An adolescent's possible response to being the victim of interpersonal violence is not limited to posttraumatic stress disorder and depression but may also involve a host of developmental effects, including the occurrence of high-risk behaviors that may have a significant and negative impact on the adolescent's psychological and physical health. Identifying such high-risk behaviors, understanding their possible link to a previous victimization incident, and implementing interventions that have been demonstrated to reduce such behaviors may help decrease potential reciprocal interactions between these areas. Clinicians in psychiatric practice may be in a unique position to make these connections, since parents of adolescents may perceive a greater need for mental health services for youth engaging in problematic externalizing behaviors than for those displaying internalizing symptoms. In this article, the authors first describe high-risk behaviors, including substance use, delinquent behavior, risky sexual behaviors, and self-injurious behaviors, that have been linked with experiencing interpersonal violence. They then review empirically based treatments that have been indicated to treat these deleterious behaviors in order to help clinicians select appropriate psychosocial interventions for this population. Recommendations for future research on the treatment of high-risk behaviors in adolescents are also presented.