The search for identity

In the news, there is frequent mention of adolescents’ mental health nowadays being ‘in crisis’. This chapter offers the perspective of two psychotherapists working in a crisis service, trying to engage adolescents and their families in therapeutic work. There is an argument for a combined developmental, psychoanalytic, and systemic approach to understanding and working with the perceived mental health crisis in adolescence. This chapter explores the desire of some adolescents today to have a mental health diagnosis and to use specific, psychiatric-oriented language to frame and understand their distress. A cultural and theoretical exploration of this phenomenon is offered, viewing it as an expression of adolescents’ need to establish their identity within peer groups, both online and offline. The chapter underlines the necessity of an approach in which the whole network around the adolescent – the school, the parents, the therapist – work together to address the crisis as if unfolds. The crisis this chapter refers to is conceptualised as one involving developmental adolescent turmoil, expressed through the language of mental health.