Would the well-timed use of EMDR therapy in the school system save the mental health of youth?  Case reports

What would be a well-timed use of psychotherapy? Adolescence is a period of development full of challenges and changes. Adolescents are very sensitive to every life situations and curious to learn and work on themselves. Being extremely vulnerable due to distinctive features of their period of development, always somewhere in the middle, between childhood and adulthood, stable and unstable, in the gap of individual internal processes of individualization, they attempt to solve interpersonal conflict and get the answer to the famous question: Who am I? (Greenwald 2000, Sagle 2013). Children and adolescents do not respond in the same way as adults to dangerous and threatening situations. Sometimes small changes in their emotional reactions can be a call for help which we sometimes fail to notice. The reasons why we need to include school psychologists are not only traumatic events, but also challenging ordinary situations in which we can see their incapability to resolve interior conflicts, impossibility to react in the right way or make acceptable decisions (Fisher et al. 2011). Taking into account that they spend most of their time in school, every change, and every new symptom can easily be observed by well educated professionals (Atkinson et al. 2014). It is estimated that in every generation about 20% of adolescents have issues serious enough to be classified as dysfunctional. But even those 80% who behave in acceptable and adaptive way are in this period of life when they have tendency to react intensively to stressful life situations, to behave risky, and this is all part of normal growing up process (Guillotta 2015). Welltimed reactions and elimination of symptoms as soon as they occur and start to disable normal everyday life could prevent appearance of psychological disorders later in life (Fleming 2012).

Journal

English

Ivana Kokanović
Mevludin Hasanović

Kokanović, I., & Hasanović, M. (2018, July). Would the well-timed use of EMDR therapy in the school system save the mental health of youth? Case reports. Psychiatria Danubina, 30(Supplement 5) S276-S281.  Presentation at the 1st EMDR Conference (2017, November) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo