William S. Pollack

The "war" for boys: Hearing "real boys'" voices, healing their pain.

Boys are in a crisis—boys in treatment and boys next door. Practitioners need to know more about research that helps to elucidate this crisis of boyhood as well as new clinical insights, derived from a modern rethinking of boyhood. The results of the Listening to Boys’ Voices project (see W. S. Pollack, 1999) are reviewed as a springboard for pragmatic suggestions for changes in clinical attitudes toward, and treatment of, boys and young men. Practitioners are also urged to help society stem the tide of pain that today’s boys must face in the midst of changing attitudes toward the normative journey toward masculinity.

SOME PHYSICOCHEMICAL ASPECTS OF HEMAGGLUTINATION

Since the discovery of the human Rh factor twenty-five years ago by Levine and Stetson,’ several methods have come into common use for detecting blood group antibodies. This has been necessary for not all antibodies react in the same way, and, even if they were to do so, not all red cell antigens are identical, so that variations in their serological reactions would still occur. I t is now well known that the most commonly found Rh antibodies do not agglutinate R h positive erythrocytes that are suspended in simple salt solutions. To obtain direct agglutination with these so-called “incomplete” antibodies, it is necessary to raise the protein concentration of the reaction mixture, or to pretreat the red cells with one of several proteolytic enzymes, or to centrifuge the mixture above 8,000 times gravity.’ There have been several mechanistic explanations for these individual reactions,’ ‘ but none prove satisfactory in being able to provide a theoretical model of agglutination that is subject to physicochemical interpretation.

Sustaining and Reframing Vulnerability and Connection

Although it may appear to represent an oxymoron within classical resiliency studies to argue that the more we can sustain and maintain (healthy) vulnerability in boys and young males the more resilient they will become and remain, that is precisely the argument of this chapter. Indeed it remains at the heart of the deconstruction of our classic model of stoic separation-based models for healthy boyhood for which the hope for genuine resiliency for young (and, for that matter older) males may lie (Pollack, 1995a, 1995b, 1998, 1999, 2000).

Scales to assess the emphasis of psychiatric hospital treatment.

There are few studies of psychiatric hospital treatment that include measures of the treatment process. Perhaps the greatest neglect exists in the failure to collect from the clinicians their observations about the treatment interventions they most emphasize in each patients treatment. The purpose of this paper is to report the development of a set of rating scales that call on hospital clinical staff to assess the relative prominence of various forms of interventions, namely, degree of restriction, vocational and avocational activities, therapeutic and community groups, medication, degree of supportive versus expressive emphasis and individual psychotherapy. We present a study of interrater reliability in a variety of hospital settings and results of a factor analysis of a portion of the scales.

Acting (to) Out: Approaching Homosexuality in a 15-Year-Old Boy with Anxiety and Depression

JM is a 15-year-old, mixed-race boy who lives with his mother and his 11-year-old sister in a suburb of a large East Coast city. At the time of his initial evaluation, he had been living temporarily in a nearby town with a maternal aunt— an arrangement meant to spare him contact with his abusive father. JM told his aunt that he had been feeling very anxious at school. His aunt noticed that JM also seemed increasingly sad and withdrawn at home, so she decided to bring him in for psychiatric evaluation. JM was examined at the outpatient child psychiatry clinic of a local teaching hospital as part of an academic seminar designed to teach interviewing skills to child psychiatry res-

Safety Assessment in Schools: Beyond Risk: The Role of Child Psychiatrists and Other Mental Health Professionals

This article presents an overview of a comprehensive school safety assessment approach for students whose behavior raises concern about their potential for targeted violence. Case vignettes highlight the features of 2 youngsters who exemplify those seen, the comprehensive nature of the assessment, and the kind of recommendations that enhance a students safety, connection, well-being; engage families; and share responsibility of assessing safety with the school.