By Gene Beresin and Steve Schlozman | September 18, 2013 | from PBS’s “Brains On Trial” Science Blog

Over the last 25 years, funding for mental health services in communities, juvenile detention centers, and in prisons has been cut back dramatically. Criminal behavior without question costs more to society than does treating psychiatric illness. Mental health treatment is effective and essential to a sane and modern society, and yet there is deplorable lack of funding or access to these services for huge swaths of our juvenile population.

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By Gene Beresin, Steve Schlozman, and Judy Edersheim | September 17, 2013 | PBS’s Brains On Trial “Science Blog”

Some kids will become violent as adolescents. Many have a very short fuse, and explode over the smallest thing. Others, like a ticking time bomb harbor pent up anger until something pops. And then there are kids who are the scariest – the ones who silently plan to harm others and don’t just fantasize, but really hurt others, verbally or physically.

What are the warning signs? What can we do if we spot kids early and prevent violence?

If we look at teenagers who have committed violent acts there are thousands with histories of fights, stealing, being the brunt of physical or verbal abuse, and victims of or perpetrators of bullying. Many have had depression, learning disorders, especially language problems. Most have been scapegoated and marginalized. Some were impulsive and just blew a fuse, others planned their offenses.

What can we do about this dilemma?

While we cannot easily identify which kid will be a societal danger, we should take some traits seriously, and if identified, make every attempt toward remediation.

Read the full post on the Brains On Trial website, where you can also find other Neurolaw resources and explore interviews with experts filmed for the show.

By Gene Beresin and Mireya Nadal-Vicens | September 16, 2013 | PBS’s Brains On Trial “Science Blog”

Teenagers are convinced they are ready to take the reins – to decide and act fully, no longer wanting to be held back by overly cautious adults who don’t really ‘get it.’ Neurobiologically speaking, the adolescent brain is poised for impulsivity and thrill-seeking.

In the documentary, “Brains on Trial with Alan Alda,” Jimmy Moran is on trial for attempted murder. Newly 18 years old, from a bad home, addicted to cocaine, questions of whether poor brain function affected his behavior the night he shot an innocent bystander remain constant. And being an adolescent, his brain was already primed for risky behavior.

Two separate but interconnected processes underlie teenage bravado. Firstly, the last wave of neurodevelopment, myelination, has yet to be completed. Myelination is the process of strengthening useful connections between neurons and omitting what is no longer needed.

By adolescence, most of the brain has been myelinated except for the frontal lobe, the center of “executive functioning” where planning, sequencing of activities and prioritizing long-range goals take place. Biologically, the long-range planning part of the brain is simply slower, less ‘hard-wired’ than the here-and-now information-processing parts of the brain.

Secondly, in part due to the slower inputs from the frontal lobe, thrills and rewards are just more thrilling and rewarding to teenagers. The reward center serves to motivate us by producing a small but powerful response to food, sex, and novel situations. Teenagers just get a whooping dose of this. In part due to the slower inputs from the frontal lobe, adolescents perceive short-term rewards as more rewarding than adults, and even small rewards are experienced as larger, better, more engrossing than they do to adults. Jokes are funnier, experiences are often, repeatedly ‘the best,’ everything is more urgent and more intense. Everything is worth doing because it feels so good, so right. The brakes, or the ability to contextualize certain pleasures and to appraise the relevant risks, are simply not hard-wired yet.

Three outside factors emphasize teenage impulsivity…

Read the full post on the Brains On Trial website, where you can also find other Neurolaw resources and explore interviews with experts filmed for the show.

By Eraka Bath, MD, Shawn Sidhu, MD, and Sofia Stepanyan, BA | July 2013 | Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry

Over the past decade, a series of U.S. Supreme Court cases have enhanced the legal rights for youth involved in the juvenile and criminal justice systems. These cases, considered landmark cases in psychiatry and the law, reflect an evolving understanding of the interplay among culpability, neurocognitive development, and adolescent behavior. Fortunately, these legislative trends represent significant gains in improving due-process protections for juveniles and have shifted the pendulum toward a more neurodevelopmental approach in thinking about culpability and rehabilitation in young offenders, a vulnerable population with high levels of psychiatric morbidity. Continue reading »

Why do teenagers seem so much more impulsive, so much less self-aware than grown-ups? Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore compares the prefrontal cortex in adolescents to that of adults, to show us how typically “teenage” behavior is caused by the growing and developing brain, in this TED Talk.

See the TED Talk page, with more resources, here.