A Psycho-Educational Group Format for Adolescents

This article considers the format of a psycho-educational group for adolescents that has been selected and adopted for ten years within the psycho-medical service of Lugano, Switzerland. The group can act as a potential change agent for those youths who will not play the symbolic psycho-therapeutic game, but who can appreciate the psycho-educational relationship as an intermediary between reality and thought. The adolescents within the group show extremely varied psychopathologies, but they also share some common features. The group is co-managed by a psychologist, a social worker, and a trainee psychologist, and can have four to ten patients aged thirteen to fifteen. There are three distinct stages of each session: welcome, snack, and game. The activity of the psycho-educational group generates group processes: the educators engaged in the relationship facilitate the support of the youth’s ego. The illusion of a group is reassuring in a narcissistic way. Thought and action are brought about in a special way within the group. Supervision plays a major role as it allows for the analysis of transference and countertransference. The psycho-educational relationship that is established within the group is a complex tie between real objects and inner objects. A clinical picture illustrates our work.