Introduction
I am curious to know who is out there in cyber land. How many of you are occupational therapists? How many of you are occupational therapy assistants? How about occupational therapy assistant students? Any other disciplines out there? Let’s ask about areas of practice. How many of you are actually working in the school system? How about rehab setting? How about a community based setting? How many of you work with the adolescent population?
Three or four years ago, if someone told me that I would be talking about and working with adolescents, I would have told them that they were absolutely crazy. The reason being is that early in my career, I did not enjoy working with the adolescent population. I always thought they were nothing but moody, self-absorbed, self-centered brats with a skewed sense of entitlement. I know that is a bad way to look at an individual, but I really never understood that population. In my younger years I did have some experience with them and it was not really good. Needless to say, as my career matured, so did my attitude and my understanding about this population. Basically all of us were adolescents at one time or another and we all probably experienced those typical adolescent feelings. Not until I really understood the developmental nature of adolescence did I begin to really enjoy the challenge of working with them.
Objectives
Today I want to first review some general things that we all know about adolescence and then I am going to go into briefly describing the types of settings in which we can work with adolescents. I would like to also share a program that I actually developed when I was the chair of an OTA program. The program was actually a non-traditional level II fieldwork placement for occupational therapy assistant students.
The objectives for today’s presentation are:
· To first discuss the psychosocial changes that an individual experiences during adolescence.
· Discuss the psychosocial aspects of a disability.
· Summarize transitional services that can involve occupational therapy practitioners.
· Identify some models of practice and assessment tools that can be used with the adolescent population.
· Then finally I want to explore with you some community-based programming for the adolescent population.
