The Symptomatic Adolescent Five Years Later: He Didn't Grow Out of It
JAMES F. MASTERSON JR. M.D.1
1 Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, Cornell University Medical College and the Payne Whitney Clinic, New York Hospital, 525 East 68th Street, New York, N. Y. 10021
Follow-up of a group of "symptomatic adolescents" five years after initial evaluation indicated that, for them, adolescence was but a way station in a long history of psychiatric illness that began in childhood and followed its own inexorable course. Indiscriminate adherence to the theory that the symptomatic adolescent will "grow out" of his difficulties, the author concludes, may discourage the therapeutic intervention necessary to interrupt the progression to marked adult psychiatric illness.
