Les B. Whitbeck: Mental Health and Emerging Adulthood Among Homeless Young People

In Mental Health and Emerging Adulthood among Homeless Young People, Les Whitbeck provides a wealth of information gathered during a 3-year longitudinal study of homeless youth in several Midwestern cities: Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Omaha, Wichita, Kansas City, and St. Louis. The purpose of this study was to collect data on young people approximately 16–19 through 19–22 years of age to assess the effects of homelessness on mental health during this critical period of development. The goal of these in-depth interviews was to shed light on a topic that has long been ignored in our country: what happens to children who run away from their homes and live on the streets. Whitbeck’s theory proposes that living on the streets would initiate a dependence on peer groups for social support rather than supportive adults, that education would be interrupted or stopped, and that financial strain would increase, as would emotional burdens that could have long lasting negative effects. These negative effects would emerge because the youth are in the space between childhood and adulthood with no one to steer them in a positive direction. There is no doubt that Whitbeck undertook a major project and made an important commitment to gathering highly needed data to report on the mental health of young adults. The book presents an overwhelming amount of information about a population of young adults that is difficult to reach and gather information from in such a systematic manner. The text is divided into 5 sections and 16 chapters. The first six chapters are intended to introduce the reader to the specific disorders prevalent among the groups of adolescents followed over the specified 3-year period of time. Since small samples of adolescents and clinical samples have shown a prevalence of mental health issues among adolescents, it follows that Whitbeck should study these disorders among this homeless population of youth who do not have adequate adult social support systems and may be at greater risk for presenting these issues. Well accepted diagnostic instruments were utilized throughout the study to test for a variety of mental illnesses. However, as with any psychological test, it is important to note that they are not 100% valid with all populations. For Whitbeck and his colleagues, this should be of particular concern because young adults generally are in a period of immense transition and this group, which consisted of youth who, in many cases, had been abused and neglected, was a particularly vulnerable and heterogeneous population. Despite these limitations, Whitbeck and his colleagues offer important findings that otherwise would not have been available. Section One—‘‘Emerging Adulthood among Runaway and Homeless Youth’’—is comprised of Chaps. 1 and 2. The first chapter provides readers with background information on homeless youths, including the important aspects of ‘‘emerging adulthood’’ (p. 11) that these runaways will be missing: accepting responsibility for oneself, financial independence, independent decision making, general independence, and establishing a household. However, the chapter serves another salient purpose: it explains to readers the detours and missed pathways to adulthood and the negative effects these have for the population of runaways studied here and runaway adolescents at large. This chapter also asserts the hypothesis that running away is part of an ‘‘anti-social trajectory’’. Simply put, Whitbeck proposes that psychologically harmed children run away from home and that the consequence of this action causes further psychological damage. A. Sardina (&) Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA e-mail: asardina@indiana.edu