wrote a seminal article titled ''Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.'' 1 They described 4 experiments in which they asked college students to estimate their performance on tests involving humor, grammar, and logic. They were struck by the finding that students who performed poorly often grossly overestimated their performance. They also noticed that students who objectively performed well often subjectively underestimated their performance. This phenomenon is commonly known as the Dunning-Kruger Curve or the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It attempts to explain why people experience a blind spot when gauging their competence. Dunning and Kruger suggested that People hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. .. this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. 1
Purpose of Review
This paper reviews the literature on the prevalence, risk factors, and effects of traumatic experiences on the mental health outcomes of minority youth in the USA.
Recent Findings
The USA has an increasing number of children and youth from minority backgrounds. Research reveals that traumatic experiences disproportionately affect minority youth. These experiences include historical/generational trauma, immigration and acculturation stressors, natural and manmade disasters, experiences of discrimination, family violence, and community violence. The COVID-19 pandemic has also disproportionately affected minority youth resulting in illness and hospitalizations. Despite the higher incidence of trauma exposure, minority youth are less likely to access medical and mental health care. These disparities are resulting in increasing rates of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, substance use disorders, and suicide in minority youth.
Summary
Recognizing and understanding the impact of trauma is critical to the healthy development and successful functioning of minority youth, and to the success of our nation.
This article presents two cases of adolescent males who were admitted to our inpatient psychiatric unit with a psychotic, disorganized presentation. Both males had a genetic vulnerability to mental illness and reported significant substance use. Their symptoms were refractory to treatment and required the use of clozapine. Both patients experienced significant side effects, which limited the maximum daily dose of clozapine. However, they responded to a dose that was much lower than that typically used in adults. There is significant evidence in the literature about cannabis use triggering psychotic breaks in vulnerable individuals. We speculate that substance use (including synthetic cannabinoids) triggers treatment-resistant psychosis that requires the use of clozapine. Further, lower doses of clozapine may be sufficient to treat the substance-induced psychotic symptoms than those typically used in adult schizophrenia.
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