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Friday, November 1, 2013

Using Mindfulness with young people: "Taming the Adolescent Mind"

Dr. Lucy Tan, whom I have had the privilege to supervise over the last few years, has recently published her work on the use of Mindfulness with adolescents who have mental health problems.
She began her work with a normative study looking at how Mindfulness could be measured, and with what it correlated:
Tan, L. & Martin, G., 2012. Mind Full or Mindful: A report on mindfulness and psychological health in healthy adolescents. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth. Published online (3rd September, 2012). DOI:10.1080/02673843.2012.709174

Then there was a small pilot study to see whether a 5 session Mindfulness group could have some impact on mental health problems and symptoms in adolescents. The results were stunning...
Tan, L. & Martin, G., 2012. Taming the Adolescent Mind: Preliminary report of a mindfulness-based psychological intervention for adolescents with clinical heterogeneous mental health diagnoses. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry. DOI 1359104512455182, 18:2, 300-312.

Armed with confidence, she then completed a randomised controlled study of 100 young people attending a child and youth mental health clinic. This paper is not yet published, but again the results are quite stunning and suggest the utility of the program she devised for her PHD.
Tan, L. & Martin, G. Taming the Adolescent Mind: A randomised controlled trial examining clinical efficacy of an adolescent mindfulness-based group program. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Submitted.
       

Now she has completed a Manual for training mental health workers: "Taming the Adolescent Mind". And a workbook for professionals to be able to train other groups of mental health workers....
Learn about the mindfulness groups, and THEN help others to gain the skills, and learn to apply them with young people.
Both of these  are for sale, and can be found at http://www.familyconcernpublishing.com.au
Scroll down on the front page to see the images, click on buy, and follow the prompts

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