For the
Try Something New Mini-Challenge,
Chris sent me
What It Takes to Pull me Through, a book about teenagers in trouble. David L. Marcus is a journalist who spent over a year following a group of teens at the Swift River Academy, a therapeutic boarding school where teens were sent so they could be helped through problems like drug abuse, eating disorders or depression, among others. He focused on a small group of teens in particular, all from very different backgrounds and experiencing different problems, and he wrote about their lives and their reactions to the therapeutic program.
Before you read the rest of this post, you should read
Chris’ review of this book. Chris is a lot more knowledgeable about these topics than I am – he’s an actual counselour who especially likes working with teens, while me, well, I’m someone who gave up psychology just as her internship was about to begin and never looked back.
That's actually one of the reasons why this book was outside my comfort zone. I hadn’t read anything to do with psychology in over four years. But Chris told me that this book was more of a personal story than a theoretical book, and he was right. He was also right about the fact that it almost reads like fiction at times – I was completely involved in these kids' stories and I had a hard time putting the book down. Without further ado, here are my answers to the questions Chris asked me:
1. Since this is all about trying something new, what did you think of this type of book?You know, I’m not even sure what type this book belongs to, but I know I certainly liked it enough to want to read something else of its kind. I remember you describing it as a sort of therapeutic school memoir, and other than being third person, that’s exactly right. Since I mostly already answered this question in my intro, I’ll leave it at that.
2. Did you have a favorite "character"?My favourites were Tyrone and D.J. They were the ones I felt closer to. While most of the other kids ended up at Swift River for going out and doing drugs, having lots of unprotected sex, being aggressive etc., those two were more the quiet, nerdy type.
Tyrone had been depressed for a very long time. He’d get up in the morning and pretend to get ready for school. Then he'd walk around the block until his mother left for work, and go back home and stay in bed all day. He’d delete the school’s call saying he’d been absent from the answering machine before his mother got home, and so this situation went on for over a year before she found out.
As for D.J, he was sent to Swift River after he ran away from home. He was one of the youngest kids in the school, if not the youngest ( he was fourteen), and when he arrived he didn’t seem to be able to pinpoint what was wrong. It turns out that his parents’ refusal to acknowledge that the fact that he was adopted might bother him was a problem, as was the fact that he was tired of being known as ADD kid.
3. What did you think of the counselor's method of helping the kids? Did you think it was effective?Some things I liked; others not so much. I liked the fact that a lot of what was done at the school was meant to teach the kids to be honest with themselves. Some of them were in grave need of that. And with that honesty eventually came acceptance.
I didn’t like the fact that the school sometimes seemed to be unnecessarily authoritative. They came up with arbitrary rules that were implemented just for the sake of making them follow rules. Or with rules that had a reason for existing, but about whose benefits I have some doubts.
I’ll give you an example: when two people, like Tyrone and D.J., were getting close and socializing mostly with each other, they’d put them on a ban. This means that they could no longer spend any time together, and so they were force to go out and socialize with other people. I understand what they were trying to do with that, but I also think that some people are naturally more comfortable with having a small number of close friends rather than a larger group of people they’re friendly with. Trying to force them to act otherwise will only make them uncomfortable, and will probably not even achieve much. And I don’t see why option b) has to be “healthier” or more desirable than option a).
Another thing that bothered me was that Rudy Bentz, the director of the program, didn’t always seem to give teens the credit they deserved. I was seriously annoyed when he gave Gennarose, the kid’s English teacher, trouble for using Heart of Darkness in class. According to him,“a teacher simply couldn’t have bunch of Swift River Kids, many of whom had endured their own heart of darkness for years, reach such a gruesome, upsetting book without the guidance of a trained counsellor.”
Seriously? Someone who says something like this simply cannot have any clue about what literature is or what it does. I was very happy that Gennarose stood her ground.
4. Did anything surprise you about the book?
I was surprised that David L. Marcus was completely invisible in the book. We know that he was there all along for fourteen months, but in the book there are no references to his presence, other than the obvious fact that if he hadn’t been there there would have been no book. On the one hand, I understand why he did this. His invisibility makes the reader feel closer to the kids, since there is no intermediary. But on the other hand, you have to wonder what his influence was. He is bond to have had some. How did the kids react to the fact that a book was being written about them? We are never told.
5. What did you love?
I loved that I grew to really care about the whole group. I loved that rather than labelling these kids, the author shows what happened in their lives to make them act and feel the way they do. We feel that what we are seeing are real teenagers, really people, rather than “clinical cases”, and I really appreciate that.
6. Anything that you hated?
Well, hate is probably too strong a word, and this is a problem with Swift River rather than with the book, but I sometimes felt that their approach was too normative; that they had this model of what a “well-adjusted teen” was like that the kids would ideally become more and more like. And there are mentions of things like “internet addiction” or “oppositional defiant disorder”, both of which bother me a lot.
I of course see why a teen skipping school and doing nothing but be online all day is a problem, but I would argue that the internet is not the cause of the problem. If the same teen was doing nothing but watch TV all day, would they label it “TV addiction”? Probably not, because TV is more socially acceptable. I know that this mistrust of the internet is beginning to disappear, but the book was written five years ago, and that was more the case then than it is now. There are other things of the sort, like Tyrone constantly being told that playing Final Fantasy for hours = baaaaaaad. Skipping school to do it is bad, obviously, but why are the games themselves “destructive” if they’re not being played at the exclusion of everything else? Would he be told the same if he was spending all those hours reading instead? Reading is also a solitary activity, but it's socially perceived as being more constructive. I’d spend large amounts of time in my teens both on the internet and playing Final Fantasy, and though some might argue otherwise, I don’t think I turned out as badly as that.
I suppose I should explain about “oppositional defiant disorder” too: I can easily see that label being used as a tool of control, just like the label “hysteria” was used to control women. And in many ways, our society is still doing the same. I honestly believe that the word “disorder” is thrown around entirely too much.
7. How likely are you to read more about this subject now?
More likely than I was before, that’s for sure. I’m very interested in teenagers, and though I usually read about them in fiction, I’m open to trying non-fiction too. And this book is a good example of how rewarding that can be. Even though there’s a lot in traditional psychology that I have problems with, books like this make me think. They inform me and help me articulate my own positions, and I like that a lot.
I’ll leave you with a quote from the very first page of the book:
Adolescence has always been turbulent, but it is more complicated today than it was just a couple of generations ago. An extensive study published in the journal Pediatrics found that nearly one in five children and adolescents suffer from some sort of behavioural or emotional illness—nearly triple the level of twenty years before. Another study found that the onset of bipolar disorder, one called maniac depression, has fallen from the early thirties to the late teens. At the same time, the number of young people in America who committed suicide tripled over thirty years before levelling off in the 1990s.
More than about “kids these days”, I think this says something about society, its expectations about young people, and its definition of “illness”.
No, it's not my birthday, but things mean a lot is two today. It's odd: sometimes it feels like I only started this blog yesterday; other times it feels like it's been longer, especially when I think of the friends I've made. I can't believe that two years ago I didn't know 
Still on cats: Maree is hosting a 
Over the past few months, I've seen several people ask if the Read-a-thon was going to continue, and if so, when we could expect the next one. The answer is yes, and the next one will be on the 18th/19th of April, starting at 12pm GMT. Like 
