Why has adolescence become a risk factor for health, including death by suicide? What changes have taken place in recent decades so that so many young people have emotional suffering that triggers the statistics of self-harm, suicide attempts, anxiety attacks and different mental disorders? The terrible event in Sallent, in which two twin sisters decided to throw themselves off the balcony, with the result that one —who according to numerous students identified as a transgender boy— lost her life and the other was seriously injured, shocked by emotional pain that expresses and causes that decision, but also because of what it has as a symptom of a phenomenon that we do not quite understand.
Adolescence and early youth is a critical age in which the mental pathologies of adult life tend to emerge. 60% of cases of severe mental illness present the first symptoms before the age of 25. But the incidence of these pathologies remains stable. Instead, the mental health of adolescents and young people is worsening due to depressive disorders and symptoms that are not endogenous, but rather reactive to an environment that damages their emotional balance. The causes can be many, but it is not normal that 42% of high school students in the United States experience persistent sadness and hopelessness and 22% have seriously thought about committing suicide, as a recent and alarming study by the Center for Control has shown. and Disease Prevention of the USA, or that 43.4% of Catalan schoolchildren between the ages of 10 and 18 have had suicidal thoughts, as revealed by another study by the Generalitat.
Why are such a high percentage of adolescents so vulnerable? Some of these studies, such as the one in the United States, also show an increase in traumatic experiences and exposure to violence of all kinds, especially suffered by girls. Nearly one in five adolescents (18%) has been a victim of sexual violence and 14% have been forcefully raped.
Another source of discomfort is the enormous social pressure that adolescents perceive regarding the performance expected of them, on which future successes and failures depend. Never had so much demand been projected onto this stage of life. In the words of Zygmunt Bauman, “progress has become something like a persistent game of chairs in which a moment of distraction can lead to an irreversible defeat, an unappealable exclusion.” But the pressure is not limited to academic and professional performance. It extends to all kinds of regulations: gender, bodily, aesthetic, sexual.
Many adolescents grow up with the imperative of achieving excellence in everything and also being happy. The happiness that is displayed on Tik-Tok can only plunge into emotional misery those who feel that their life is nothing like those clichés. All those who are outside the canon, which are many, are pointed out as guilty of their failure. And they isolate themselves. Curiously, the statistics on unwanted loneliness and emotional isolation have a U shape: the highest incidence occurs at both ends of life, between the oldest and the youngest.
All this emotional discomfort has to be managed and sometimes it emerges in a violent way: towards oneself, with self-harm or suicide attempts, or towards others, in the form of bullying the weakest. And the circle closes. That life is not easy has been experienced before by many generations, each with its own specific causes of suffering. What is surely new now is that all this cultural and structural pressure falls on adolescents who, as children, have often grown up in an environment of overprotection, in which they have not learned to manage frustration or annoyance, they have not been taught to defend themselves nor have they had to face an adverse situation on their own. Of that, they are also victims.
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