Resiliency is the ability to bounce back or cope well in the face of adversity, and preventionists are recognizing the promise of this approach, with its emphasis on strengths and the enhancement of individual and environmental protective factors. Feminist scholars and resiliency researchers have highlighted significant gender differences in susceptibility to, and protection from, situations of risk. However, there are few prevention programs that have incorporated gender-specific resiliency strategies. This paper will argue for the importance in the field of substance abuse prevention of developing different strategies for girls and boys to meet their varying needs.
This article presents integrative model to aid clinicians in understanding suicide attempts by adolescent Hispanic females. On the basis of knowledge accumulated through clinical and research experience, the model describes a convergence of sociocultural, familial, developmental, and psychological factors that include considerations of family and parental functioning; adolescent female development; and the relationships of fathers, mothers, and daughters.
RESILIENCE IS THE REMARKABLE capacity of individuals to withstand considerable hardship, to bounce back in the face of adversity, and to go on to live functional lives with a sense of well-being. Resilient people have the "capacity to be bent without breaking and the capacity, once bent, to spring back" (Vaillant, 1993, p. 248). The premise is that everyone who has survived a trauma, or a neglectful or abusive childhood, has some strength that got her through the experience, and that this strength or capacity for mental health is innate and directly accessible (Mills, 1995). Clinicians working in a resilience framework assess how the person coped with stress and hardship and work to strengthen those coping strategies. The therapeutic relationship serves as the vehicle for accessing and supporting resilient traits-thus fostering the ability to "spring back."The shift from focusing on risk factors, mother-child bonding, and the primacy of parental behavior as predictors of personality to innate strengths and coping strategies comprises some of the key concepts of resilience. Recent studies have found that people tend to adapt to the present and that positive relationships and chance encounters, accidents, disease, and community environment have just as great an effect on well-being as does the infant bond with the mother (Lewis, 1998;Harris, 1998). Although developmental psychologists, feminist scholars, and resilience researchers do not all agree on the most vital factors that shape personality and adjustment, they do agree that people can emerge from childhood environments of risk and trauma with a sense of well-being
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