Irritability and Disruptive Behavior Disorders

Chronic irritability has recently been established as an affective component of pediatric disruptive behavior disorders. In this chapter, the authors review its relationship to disruptive behaviors, with a particular focus on aggression and major disruptive behavior disorders. Defined as a decreased threshold to respond to provocation with anger and temper outbursts, chronic irritability has long been considered an important feature of emotionally driven, disruptive behavior. Recent investigations into irritability suggest that it has important prognostic value for disruptive youth. Furthermore, investigations of disruptive behaviors have informed work on irritability, yielding promising leads for understanding its pathophysiology and treatment.

Disruptive Youth: Toward an Ethnographic Turn in Youth Ministry

This article explores the problem of youth from the multidisciplinary viewpoints of Youth Ministry and Childhood Studies, arguing that while Youth Ministry has been limited by paradigms of developmentalism and hampered by theological essentialism, theories of childhood as a social construct and children as social actors in Childhood Studies have yet to penetrate Youth Ministry or influence society. Anticipating the potential for Youth Ministry to serve as a field for new concepts of youth, the authors posit that an ‘ethnographic turn,’ or an ethical re-orientation toward the ‘Other-ness’ of youth might allow adults to be powerfully ‘disrupted’ by God’s action in youth in the world. As such, an ‘ethnographic turn’ in Youth Ministry serves both to complement the ‘theological turn’ by providing a practical method for accessing youth experience in relationship and to critically refine Childhood Studies’ theory of child agency and failure to effect contemporary society.