Broken youth

This article is published in issue 3 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until January 18, 2022

Perhaps not everyone is fully aware of this, but the pandemic has caused and continues to cause serious damage to numerous adolescents, now in great psychic suffering I listened to the adventures of the boys who came to tell me about them, trying to understand what was broken in their mental functioning, e it seemed to me that their growth stopped and that their disorientation is producing painful confusion and dark malaise.

I got told, I paid attention to very worried parents, I tried to reconstruct the sense of so much discomfort together with the colleagues of the Free Minotaur Consultancy, which I have been directing for many years. It does not seem to me that defining the manifestation of their suffering as “disease” helps to understand and teaches how to intervene. They are boys traumatized by indifference with which tools that were used for their growth have been stolen. In the eyes of adults, closing down a gym, locking up a swimming pool, suspending football matches may seem like a marginal decision, but it is not for a boy who, for example, has long established a devoted relationship with the culture of the gym. he believed that football could also be a profession that would allow him a prestigious future.

The list of seized activities is very long, but everything revolves around a preventive dogma: the only sure way not to get infected is to stay at home. Too bad it is precisely what adolescents at their age cannot and no longer want to do. It would be useful, then, to convey this message to them: if we impose prohibitions and prohibitions, it is because we are also asking the youngest to collaborate in a great project for the salvation of humanity, threatened by a lethal virus.

No teenager told me about the fear of getting sick or dying: many, however, exposed for a long period to a constricting regime, admitted to having suffered psychological damage. This set of rules cannot fail to have interfered with the realization of one of the most ardently experienced developmental tasks of adolescents: no longer feeling only children, but also social and sexual subjects. In adolescence, staying “inside” and depriving oneself of the “outside” can represent a risk factor and lead to an evolutionary failure depression, triggered by a stop imposed along that necessary process of subjectivation and emancipation.

Even the complex organizational vicissitudes of the school should not be underestimated: for the partial loss of contact with classmates and professors as well as for the evaporation of a complex network of less conspicuous functions, but very useful in terms of identity and that of building one’s future, intertwined with the progressive discovery of one’s vocation personal.

Then, of course, there is the family unit and the broader one (social, cultural) in which adolescents have lived in the last two years, in a climate of serious apprehension transmitted by the “adult” world both for the health crisis and for the economic and employment crisis. The adolescent is the child of the context in which he grows up. And if in recent times it is clear that there has been very little to be happy, the boys testify with convincing evidence.

• Gustavo Pietropolli Charmet, psychiatrist and adolescent psychotherapist, is a founding member of the Minotauro Institute in Milan.