ARE ADOLESCENTS BEING DIAGNOSED WITH THE PATHOLOGIES OF SOCIETY?

August 2026

A 2026 Danish qualitative study reconceptualizes adolescent ill-being as socially produced pathologies. It identifies four positions: hyper-significance, fantasised significance, apathy and invisibility (Lausten Kragh, Jacobsen, and Kjær 2026). Its force lies in overturning the usual clinical perspective: the “troubled adolescent” may be carrying a disorder of the social world.

In hyper-significance, every examination, outfit, conversation and feeling becomes consequential. The self is managed like a permanent enterprise — monitored, compared and optimized until it consumes the energy required to live beyond it. At the opposite pole, marginalized young people are ignored, excluded or treated as interchangeable. Some withdraw into apathy after being classified and managed by institutions without ever being recognized as subjects.

There is no single youth mental-health crisis, but a divided economy of significance. Some adolescents are damaged by the obligation to matter continuously; others by repeated proof that they do not matter at all. Anxiety, depression, withdrawal or self-harm may appear in both, but diagnostic language conceals the opposing social injuries beneath them. Once entered into a clinical file, their social production disappears.

Treatment can then reproduce the pathology. The hyper-significant adolescent receives more introspection, emotional monitoring and work on herself. The invisible adolescent receives more assessment, classification and behavioural supervision. One is taught to watch herself; the other is watched by institutions. Both are returned to themselves as the source of the problem.

Psychiatry must ask not only which disorder an adolescent has, but which social relation has become symptomatic inside that adolescent. Otherwise society will continue producing ill-being through competitive over-significance and organized insignificance, then purchase its innocence by medicalizing the result. The adolescent becomes the patient; society escapes diagnosis.

Liviu Poenaru

REFERENCE

Lausten Kragh, Iben, Betina Skov Jacobsen, and Anna Ryberg Kjær. 2026. “Too Much or Never Enough: Mattering and Adolescent Ill-Being. Revisiting Social Pathologies through the Schism between Hyper-Significance and Invisibility.” International Journal of Adolescence and Youth 31 (1): 2696309.