Psychologist Spreads Word on Perils That Are Faced by Teens

Peter Frank would like to remind you of the difficulties of being a teen-ager.

Theirs is a world of drug abuse. Child abuse. Depression. Suicide. Bulimia. Anorexia. Teen-age pregnancy. Venereal disease. Running away. Parental divorce. Stress.

It is not a pretty list, not a list to make a parent sleep comfortably.

Too bad, says Peter Frank.

“These are issues that need to be brought to the attention of the community, whether they like it or not,” said Frank, a psychologist who runs the Center for Student Concerns, an organization that operates training and education programs for students and teachers through the county Office of Education. “The bottom line is that (people) are not comfortable with (them).”

For 15 years, Frank has been trying in various ways to tell San Diego County parents and educators that, when it comes to growing up, it’s still a jungle out there. Though progress has been made by organizations such as his, Frank is still dispirited about a general unwillingness to confront kids’ problems head-on.

Discussion of suicide, for example, “is still taboo among principals, among teachers, among parents,” he said. “It’s not a subject they like to talk about. It’s not a subject they want to bring into the schools, though some have.

“There’s a real reticence on the part of principals and parents to deal with these subjects, unless they are forced to.”

According to experts, suicide is the third-leading cause of death among teen-agers. If researchers could determine how many supposedly accidental teen-age deaths were actually intentional, those same experts believe that suicide would be considered the leading cause of teen-age deaths.

Teen pregnancy is another issue that parents and policy-makers want to avoid, Frank said. In July, San Diego Unified School District trustees became the first in the nation to refuse to establish a school-based health clinic for teen-agers. The 3-2 vote against the proposal came after a well-organized campaign to defeat it by parents and Catholic Bishop Leo T. Maher, who opposed the idea of distributing contraceptives at the clinic.

Yet more than 1 million teen-agers became pregnant in 1983, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute in New York City. U.S. teens have more than twice the pregnancies of teens in England and Wales, which are second on the list, statistics show.

The United States is “the only government of the so-called progressive countries that is almost openly opposed to birth control,” Frank said. “Here . . . we cut back on the opportunity for kids to get birth control. We cut back on the opportunity to sex education.”

For the past nine months, Frank has taken a new approach. He continues to produce the seminars, training materials and lectures that are the mainstay of his job, but Frank has turned to television to bring his message to parents and kids.

His “Youth in Crisis” panel discussion show, aired every two weeks on local access cable channels throughout the county, includes topics such as drug abuse, that are on every educator’s lips these days, and the more unpopular subjects like suicide that Frank feels compelled to bring to the community’s attention.

Though it lacks the pace of “Donahue” or the any of the popular issue-oriented talk shows, Youth in Crisis is attracting a small following, said Richard Harrison, producer and director of the Instructional Television division of the County Office of Education, which broadcasts the shows.

Frank has incorporated live audiences and call-in sessions into the show and is attracting 10 to 15 calls per show, Harrison said. He has had students on the show to talk about their depression, drug use and eating disorders. He has had police officers and an ACLU lawyer argue about drug busts in the school. On another show, a parent activist opposed to health clinics debated a doctor in favor of them.

Frank also produces instructional shows on similar topics that are shown via cable TV hookups in schools across the county.

It is a calling Frank came to early in his career with the county. In the early 1970s, Frank, who declined to reveal his age, wrote a column, “Frank Answers,” for the San Diego Tribune. Later, he was host to “Conversations with Dr. Frank” on radio station KFSD. He has appeared on numerous other radio and TV talk shows.

His goal, he said, is to encourage parents to deal with these problems before a crisis occurs. “We can’t just stick our fingers in the dike when something explodes. All of these are issues that are ready to explode,” Frank said, noting a substantial increase in eating disorders among high school-aged students and increased concern with drug abuse. “I’m trying to be pro-active, rather than reactive.”

The growing AIDS epidemic is a prime example. “The whole issue of sexual behavior is going to become a big issue (in the schools) soon,” he said. “I’m very concerned how the schools will handle that whole (AIDS) issue once it becomes a reality. Right now, it’s an academic issue (because no known AIDS victim attends county schools). But there are tremendous legal issues involved and tremendous ethical issues involved.”

A few school districts like San Diego Unified are adopting AIDS-education curricula, but many are not. Such a head-in-the-sand attitude has been seen before, particularly on the drug and teen-pregnancy issues, he said.

“I can remember, maybe only two to three years ago, when you could go into a school district and be told, ‘We don’t have a drug problem,’ ” Frank said.

One obstacle to progress is the recent government obsession with drug abuse, which has focused attention too narrowly on drugs as teens’ major problem, Frank said. In reality, Frank believes these abuses are an outgrowth of some teen-agers’ internal problems.

“Low self-esteem is at the core of everything,” he said. “The individual does not like himself, has no confidence in himself, cannot make decisions and so drifts and is open to the last person who talks to (him).”

As many educators have noted, television is not helping. On soap operas, “nobody gets pregnant. Nobody uses birth control and down the line, nobody will get AIDS.”

But educators also are not helping, he said. Frank is suspicious of the ethics of voluntary drug testing--which has been adopted by San Diego city, Coronado and Fallbrook school districts--and is openly hostile to undercover drug busts that have become a widespread method of combating drug dealing on campuses.

“It’s a desperate measure to do something,” he said. “Its purely pragmatic effect is very limited.

“Some youngsters will do almost anything to be accepted and to belong. The undercover operatives exploit that, as well as the machismo aspect of male teen-age behavior.”

The ultimate damage created by drug busts may be the erosion of teens’ trust in the adults they are told to emulate, Frank believes.

“We try to teach kids to be trusting. We try to teach kids to respect their elders and have confidence in their teachers and believe that society is good. And then we do something that entraps them.”