Cries in crisis

This chapter, written by three clinicians, all of whom have extensive experience working in Looked-After Children (LAC) Services within the NHS, focuses on the particular experience of adolescent LAC presenting to Adolescent Crisis Teams. They conceptualise the risks that emerge during looked-after adolescents’ crises as the ‘tip of the iceberg’ that becomes visible in the adolescent’s life after years of (often) abuse, neglect, and trauma. They explore some of the ways the network around the looked-after adolescent who now presents in crisis reproduce the traumatic circumstances of the young person’s earlier experiences – moving swiftly between denying the trauma and crisis and ‘wanting to get rid of the young person’, to the other extreme of idealising the capacity of psychotherapy to ‘fix’ in an almost magical way. The authors explore how all these dynamics unfold within the busy environment of looked-after and adolescent crisis teams and reconsider the crises of the adolescents as cries for help and communication.