An Unchanged Mind: The Problem of Immaturity in Adolescents

An Unchanged Mind begins with a clinical riddle: Why are American teenagers failing to develop normally through adolescence? We are presented with case studies from a therapeutic boarding school for troubled teenagers: All new students had been deemed treatment “failures” after conventional psychiatric care. All were bright teenagers, full of promise, not obviously “ill.” Yet they found themselves unprepared for the challenges of modern adolescence and inevitably failed—at school, at home, and among their peers socially.

An Unchanged Mind is the discovery of the essence of this problem—disrupted maturation and resulting immaturity. The book explains the problem carefully, with a brief review of normal development and an examination of the delays today’s teenagers are suffering: the causes of those delays and how they produce a flawed approach to living. There is a solution. With a sustained push to help troubled kids catch up, symptoms abate, academic and interpersonal functioning improve, and parents pronounce their teens miraculously recovered. This remedy is not a matter of pharmacology—and the cure is not in pills. The remedy is, instead, to grow up.

John A. McKinnon, M.D., was educated at Harvard, Cambridge University, Case Western Reserve University, Yale, and Norwich University. He taught at the University of California, San Francisco, and directed psychiatry hospital programs in Texas and Montana. Disgusted with the mediocrity of "managed" care, he left traditional medical centers to co-found Montana Academy, a therapeutic school for troubled teenagers on a remote ranch near Glacier Park. His co-founder and wife, Rosemary, is also a therapist, and they have three daughters.