Breaking Points: Youth Mental Health Crises and How We All Can Help Volume 18

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Unprecedented numbers of young people are in crisis today, and our health care systems are set up to fail them. Breaking Points explores the stories of a diverse group of American young adults experiencing psychiatric hospitalization for psychotic symptoms for the first time and documents how patients and their families make decisions about treatment after their release. Approximately half of young people refuse mental-health care after their initial hospitalization even though we know that better outcomes depend on early support for youth and families. In attempting to determine why this is the case, Neely Laurenzo Myers identifies what matters most to young people in crisis, passionately arguing that health care providers must attend not only to the medical and material dimensions of care but also to a patient’s moral agency.

Neely Laurenzo Myers is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Mental Health Equity Lab at Southern Methodist University and author of Recovery’s Edge. She is also Editor-in-Chief of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.