Addictions in young people: discomfort amplified by the excessive use of social media

That of digital natives (born between the end of the nineties and the early 2000s) a generation increasingly exposed to network risks. According to a study promoted by the Department of Anti-drug Policies of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers and by the National Center for Addiction and Doping of the Higher Institute of Health, on a sample of more than 8,700 students between 11 and 17 years old, 2.5% (around 99,600 Italian students) presents characteristics compatible with one social media addiction and 12% (about 480 thousand students) at risk of developing a video game use disorder. Furthermore, 1.8% of middle school students (approximately 30,175 middle school adolescents) and 1.6% of high school students (approximately 35,792 children) have come to experience a condition of voluntary social isolation in their room (hikikomori), with a higher prevalence among girls.

The immoderate use of social media

Discomfort can also arise in this generation fromexcessive use of social media which fits into a peculiar moment in the lives of young people who are struggling with the struggle of to grow up. In developmental age, polydrug consumption and abusive behaviors should not be made pathological. It can'tso, talk about dependent conduct

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HERE the dossier on young people and addiction, ed) already structured as in adults, except in rare cases. The brain is still being built and personal identity is being formed. Problematic use of substances and the internet can be solved if you work on the underlying discomfort and on the advanced tasks it tries to respond to, declares Paola Coppin, medical psychotherapist, head of the Early Diagnosis and Treatment service for young people between 14 and 24 years of age at the Santi Paolo e Carlo Asst in Milan.

Feeling great and becoming one: anxiety from expectations and peer judgments

The teenager smokes cannabis, drinks and takes cocaine for feel greatmore casual and become part of the peer group, or to transgressive purpose to break away from the family, or, again, to escape from pain, fatigue, disappointment, performance anxiety explains Coppin. At the base there is a difficulty in becoming great. In these young people, the evolutionary path that has stalled, putting them in crisis, underlines Antonina Contino, psychotherapist, head of the under 25 Androna youth service of the Trieste Health Authority, must be reactivated. But what are the evolutionary challenges that kids try to solve by clinging to drugs, alcohol and gambling? They are what they have to face to make the transition from childhood to adulthood. They concern the process of separation from parents and the formation of individual identity, the mentalization of the bodily self, that is, the acceptance of the physical change in puberty and the identification with the new body, and social birth, understood as the construction of a system of values ​​that guides actions and personal choices – explains Contino —. Today teenagers have a harder time growing up. They are very sensitive to the judgment of others due to the excessive use of social media, in which they are exposed to likes, comments and ratings even from complete strangers. Plus many parents load up on expectations their children are very high from an early age, they do not know how to appreciate them for who they really are and they stop feeling like protagonists of their lives and do not know who they are. Sometimes, however, it happens that the adult, who should be rooting for the boy, is so caught up in himself that he doesn't see him.

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