Ungas psykiska ohälsa i medicinsk media 1970-2017

Abstract

Mental health issues in young people have been a growing concern in most Western countries since the 1990s. This article is not about an increase in or statistics of mental health, but about discussions in medical literature over the last 40 years. In this article, I investigate the discourse on children’s and young people’s mental health during the 1970s, 1990s and 2010s. The study is based on articles in the Swedish Medical Journal about mental, psychological and psychosocial problems in young people. The picture that emerges is characterized by a consistent view of an ongoing increase in mental illness and psychosocial problems, and higher rates of problems for girls. Above all, the health problems that are addressed and the explanations for them are changing. In the 1970s there was a notion that girls are more fragile than boys and biological explanations were used. The group of children and young people discussed was relatively homogeneous in the 1970s. From the 1990s the discussion became increasingly heterogeneous with different health problems, symptoms, expressions and needs. While in the early articles writers describe how teenagers’ mental health problems were increasing, texts from the later decades are concerned that girls’ mental problems are increasing and a greater gender awareness can be traced. Another change over time is the emergence of new diagnoses, behaviours and symptoms. While the problems during the 1970s are described in the form of depression, headache, and self-destructive behaviour, stress-related problems with psychosomatic expressions are observed and described to a greater extent from the 1990s onwards. There is an obvious change in the new attention given to the importance of living habits for psychosocial ill-health that reveals a change in young people’s leisure habits.