Adolescent mental health: a symptom of a vulnerable society

The mental health crisis is already a feature of the 21st century, also identified as "the century of loneliness." Initially, older people were the ones who suffered most from mental health crises and loneliness for seemingly obvious reasons. It was also expected in other age groups (those in their 30s, 40s, and 50s); each decade brings its own crisis: precarious jobs, mortgages, first divorces, medical checkups, and so on.

However, today's mental health crisis is primarily associated with children, adolescents, and young adults, ages that are increasingly fluid and those that are currently in the worst situation (not for nothing are they known as the "anxious generation").

Studies show that 35 to 50 percent of schoolchildren and college students experience symptoms of anxiety and depression. Other problems—such as addictions, anorexia, bulimia, self-harm, suicidal thoughts and suicide, or ADHD—are also on the rise. Adolescent mental health hospitalizations are increasing and are beginning at younger ages.

The mental health crisis affecting children, adolescents, and young adults is doubly paradoxical. On the one hand, it occurs in a welfare society, and on the other, it affects the prime ages of life, who receive emotional well-being care like never before.

A common explanation emphasizes the stress that younger generations are supposedly under. It's often cited as school pressure (homework, exams, tests), climate change (eco-anxiety), and social media.

It is difficult to see school pressure as an explanation, since educational contexts ensure that nothing disrupts the well-being of students , avoiding corrections and failures and, instead, showing signs of approval.

Universities themselves have become "safe spaces" to ensure that nothing contradicts students' opinions, when they should be precisely "unsafe" places for preconceived opinions in the interest of new knowledge, including those that challenge what is taken for granted.

Eco-anxiety—actually, anxiety about the undoubtedly worrying news about climate change— is also difficult to see as an explanation for the mental health crisis, despite the fact that 84 percent of 16- to 25-year-olds report it. Eco-anxiety is more of an ethical and political position than a psychological condition.

Social media has indeed been exacerbating the psychological distress of children, adolescents, and young people, notably since 2012, when its use became widespread. However, social media does not explain the crisis, which was already present. They exacerbate it, but they do not create it.

Stress is always relative to vulnerability, so the same situation can be stressful for some and irrelevant, or even a challenge, for others. Vulnerability is often understood in terms of genetic and neurodevelopmental predisposition, giving rise to the vulnerability-stress explanation.

Vulnerability in this explanation is inferred from the given ailments. You have depression because you are vulnerable, and you are vulnerable because you have depression. A tautological explanation.

However, the new generations certainly seem to be more vulnerable than the previous ones. Beyond genetics, neurodevelopment, and any supposed mental impairment, vulnerability must be sought elsewhere: we live in a society that makes us vulnerable.

Society may be unintentionally making the new generations vulnerable, even wanting the opposite: for them not to be vulnerable, but to have self-esteem and be happy. The problems are not due to defects in the mind or brain of children. The so-called "mental disorders" do not exist within children, adolescents, and young people, but within the society in which they are raised and developed: a vulnerable society. The mental health crisis itself would be a symptom of society.

A vulnerable society is defined by two mutually reinforcing characteristics: on the one hand, overprotection (how children are raised and educated) and, on the other, a culture of diagnosis (according to which any illness easily enters the clinical radar).

Overprotection based on consent, smoothing the way for the child so that he doesn't stumble, instilling self-esteem through flattery ("you're special," etc.) is often justified by the (true) idea that children are vulnerable.

However, if someone is treated as vulnerable, they become vulnerable. As Goethe said: “Treat a human being as he is, and he will remain what he is; treat him as he can and ought to be, and he will become what he can and ought to be.”

Without any scientific basis, and against common sense, new generations of parents have assumed that anything other than fulfilling their children's desires could cause trauma. Based on the idea that children know what they want, parenting has become about supporting them.

The path is prepared for the child, but not for the child for the road of life, which will always have rocks, puddles, ups and downs, crossroads, etc. We have, so to speak, children inflated with self-esteem, overprotected, barely exposed to the difficulties that life always presents. Vulnerable to the occasional setback.

Since the 1990s, a whole culture of diagnosis (also known as therapy culture) has increasingly been established, which facilitates the entry of everyday life's ailments into the clinical radar . Landmarks of this culture can be found in the series The Sopranos (1999–2007) and the film A Therapy to Kill (1999), where the toughest men in the mafia go to psychotherapy, as well as in Oprah Winfrey's famous American television show (1986–2011) with a "psychotherapy session" type format. More than a landmark, The Oprah Winfrey Show created an entire "culture of confession" of psychological problems that seemed to have a therapeutic effect in itself.

Since then, having psychological problems and going to psychotherapy has ceased to be a stigma and has become a trend nowadays.

The impact of the miniseries Adolescence remains to be seen; whether, for example, its focus on the social fabric—rather than on the victim—will offer a social perspective rather than just an individual psychological one.

The truth is that today, clinical language has taken over the subject of suffering, to the detriment of other possible languages, such as social, political, moral, and existential, which could address problems from a different dimension less focused on the individual as a "mentally ill person."

Allow me to answer this rhetorical question. Diagnoses reassure parents because they assume their children have something—anxiety, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder—that would explain their discomfort (otherwise inexplicable, since they lack nothing). Emotional well-being is taking on a new importance in schools.

Health professionals are overwhelmed. Children, adolescents, and young people are delighted with diagnoses, as they make them visible. "Rather diagnosed than invisible," seems to be the motto. For politicians, there's nothing like having citizens diagnosed with something, so they already have enough to deal with. And it's perfect for society, since it privatizes problems it itself creates as something that individuals have.

For now, we should think beyond the crisis itself as if it were something that has befallen us from unknown sources and from unknown reasons. According to the above, the crisis could be explained by the vulnerable society we have created. While, on the one hand, children are overprotected, making them more vulnerable—instead of less so, as is assumed—on the other, clinical language has taken over ailments that are never lacking. As if that weren't enough, the diagnosis has gone from stigma to fashion, becoming little less than a privilege.

Since the discomfort is real—how it has become real is another matter—psychological support is necessary. There are two fronts: the immediate response to the case and the preventive. The given case must be addressed and evaluated. The best support would be one that seeks to normalize the discomfort, placing it in the context of the circumstances and changing them as much as possible, rather than focusing on exploring feelings and supposed traumas, which would be just another form of "navel-gazing."

With a view to prevention—and with future generations in mind—it would be time to review the overprotective education and clinical culture that tends to pathologize life's inherent problems without attempting to change society. One thing is certain: the solution does not lie in more psychologists and psychiatrists, who will always be few in number.

(*) Psychologist, academic, and essayist, University of Oviedo. (**) This is a non-profit organization that seeks to share academic ideas and knowledge with the public. This article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons license.