Confidentiality and Consent when working with Adolescents

What are the laws and best practices around consent and confidentiality with adolescents? Dr. Wendy Duncan explains this and expands on how to deal with tricky issues that often arise from such work.

While adolescents have their own minds and are going through a process of forming their individual identities, they still find themselves embedded in a family system, reliant on parental figures for financial, practical, and sometimes emotional support. They straddle autonomy and limits on their freedom imposed by parental norms, rules and values. Grey areas can arise in psychotherapy or psychiatric treatment situations, and it is important to clarify consent and confidentiality at the outset.

Dr. Duncan addresses dilemmas you may encounter in clinical practice, such as:

• Situations where a parent brings an adolescent for psychotherapy or psychiatric treatment, but the adolescent is unwilling to engage
• Situations where an adolescent seeks psychotherapy or psychiatric treatment, but parents are unwilling to consent
• Situations where parents are divorced, and the adolescent and one parent consents to treatment, while the other parent opposes treatment
• Situations where an adolescent expects confidentiality in psychotherapy or psychiatric treatment
• Situations where an adolescent wishes for confidentiality but presents a risk to themselves or others

Watch the short clip below to see how Dr. Wendy Duncan uses ethics and law to engage with these dilemmas.

-Leanne

If you're interested in work with adolescents, watch the trailer for Dr. Duncan's full talk on adolescent depression here

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