Psychological Counseling for Children and Adolescents

Dear Colleagues,

Unlike therapies in physical medicine, psychological therapy cannot result from diagnoses and therapeutic interventions based on biological, anatomopathological or pharmacological evidence of causality. Regarding the current classification of mental disorders, all diagnoses are given by humans based on exclusively clinical observations. The interventions use psychological approaches developed from a philosophical corpus and are still closely linked to it.

As a physical counter-example, let us consider that everywhere in Europe (and perhaps also worldwide), the way that an oncologist would react to breast cancer would be relatively unified, but on the contrary, psychological counselling for children and adolescents strongly differs between professionals. That is why today it is still too early to have a unique, well-documented and well-proven procedure; it seems better at this stage to let diverse research explain different researchers’ experiences. 

When brief psychological counselling is given for a patient or their relatives, its effect often quickly fades. Fluctuations in self-esteem or poor mentalization regularly lead to failure of the intervention. Mentalization, meaning difficulties in identifying the ideas and affects that are present in our minds and the minds of others, is primarily a psychoanalytic concept. Improving mentalization improves psychological counselling in still-unstable identities.

Therefore, we suggest collecting in this Special Issue, without a priori unification, texts from all experts in childhood and adolescence (physicians, pediatricians, psychiatrists, psychologists, and epidemiologists, but also psychoanalysis, psychosomatics, sociology, law and ethics specialists as well as social workers) centered on the design of their practice regarding a pathology (physical or psychological) or regarding an interventional technique (for patients or their relatives).

Dr. Jean-Michel Darves-Bornoz
Dr. Jean-Louis Chabernaud
Guest Editors

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• psychotherapy
• behavior
• emotion
• mentalization
• addiction
• suicide
• fugue
• assault
• trauma
• illness
• psychosomatic medicine
• emergency psychology
• trauma psychotherapy
• mentalization
• social philosophy
• ethics