Elliott Currie is a Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine.

In his book, the ROAD TO WHATEVER: MIDDLE CLASS CULTURE AND THE CRISIS OF ADOLESCENCE, Currie weighs in on the causes of the many perils that afflict middle-class adolescents. Currie notes that while this particular demographic enjoys widespread economic prosperity, the “children of that prosperity were turning up drug addled, locked in juvenile detention institutions, adolescent mental health wards, and drug treatment facilities; all too many were losing their lives in accidents and violence, and far more, although less drastically impaired, were adrift, at risk, and emotionally lost.”

He writes:

“It is no longer possible to deny that there is widespread alienation, desperation, and violence among the youth of what we have sometimes persuaded ourselves is a tranquil and unproblematic middle class. Yet for the most part, the crisis has been either ignored or, when it explodes into public view, misunderstood. And that is a tragedy, because there are lives at stake. There is much real suffering among middle-class adolescents. Most of it is far less spectacular and far more routine than the handful of incidents that reach the news. But it takes lives, cripples spirits, and destroys futures every day in the United States. The absence of adequate explanations leaves us unprepared to help where help it urgently needed; worse, it leads us to adopt strategies that, if anything, may make life more difficult for adolescents who are adrift and in pain.”

Currie includes extensive—and heartbreaking—interviews with troubled teenagers to show how childhood trauma and the lack of caring environments create a harsh culture that leads to self destructiveness, despair, and desperation. And his investigation can be read to gain insight into what has gone awry for many troubled adolescents, not just those in the middle class.

This book was written in 2004, and much of this will be familiar to those of you working to build a trauma-informed world. But Currie’s portrayals of troubled adolescents are so deeply empathic and show so vividly how the helping professions may inadvertently brutalize the kids they are supposed to be helping that the ROAD TO WHATEVER remains a timeless classic in my view. It’s why we here at ACES Connection do what we do.