LA RELAZIONE DI ALLEANZA CON I GENITORI COME FATTORE CONDIZIONANTE L’ADERENZA AL PROGETTO TERAPEUTICO E L’EVOLUZIONE CLINICA DELL’ADOLESCENTE CON DISAGIO PSICHICO

The focus of this paper is the work with parental couple of adolescents with mental disease. In fact it is thought of the adolescent patient as an adult about whom it is not important to treat with his/her parents as it is when working with children. The Authors assumed it is a good practice to give a space to adolescents’ parents as well and to create a collaborative relationship with them. After a brief introduction where it is treated some questions around the alliance with parental couple paying particular attention to difficulties of creating a collaborative relationship, they are presented some data from clinical studies. Two adolescent case reports are considered: one is about adolescents who had come to the service the Authors work in for a diagnostic evaluation after which they were suggested to go into psychotherapy; in this case the work with adolescents and their families was mainly clinical. The other case report is about adolescents who were followed within a daily service where the main approach was an educational one. The results - valid for the two of therapeutic environments, the clinical and the educational one - suggest that a therapeutic alliance with parents can influence both adolescents’ compliance and clinical evolution. This paper underlines how it is important, for the efficacy of therapy, to treat with adolescents’ parents as an integrative part of the approach to mental disease in adolescence.