The need to feel alive - different faces of depression in young offenders (1.5 CEs)

Depressive states are common in young offenders and important to recognize, to fully understand what may drive violent, anti-social behaviors. Performance tests are indispensable as depressive emotions are often disguised and denied. We develop concepts around depression and violence and touch upon the psychology of “toxic masculinity”. Our methodological framework is multi-method assessment including the Rorschach and the Wartegg tests with an extra twist as in our case presentation of a young offender in institutional care, we adopt blind interpretation of the Wartegg, before integrating the results with other test data. We also adopt a multi-theoretical and multi-cultural approach including Theory of constructed emotion and intersectionality.

Goals & Objectives

1. Describe different expressions of depression and how these are connected to the construction of emotions and masculinities. 
2. Explain how experiential blindness to depressive emotions may be identified through the construction of answers to performance based tasks. 
3. Apply multi method assessment based on the knowledge that each method may be seen as a situation with different attributes that pulls on different characteristics.