Over the past decades, reports from official authorities and the media have suggested that there is a ‘crisis’ in young people’s mental health. However, there is considerable uncertainty regarding how to interpret the data referred to in these alarming reports. The present article draws on ‘the minority voices’ of young people and theories developed by Ian Hacking to undertake a critical analysis of the conceptualisation of young people’s mental health. According to Hacking, systems of classifications formulate general truths about people and frame the suffering of individuals in specific ways. Classification changes people. However, young people are social actors who interact with classifications of their mental health and by doing so they could cause classifications to be redrawn. Hacking refers to these feedback effects as ‘looping effects’. Based on 51 interviews with 15-year-olds, this article explores how young people interact with psychiatric labels associated with their wellbeing such as anxiety and depression. We demonstrate how the participants gave new meaning to these psychiatric labels, devalued and gave nuance to them, and by doing so transformed them into cultural categories rather than diagnostic categories. We discuss the potential looping effects related to young people’s mental health and how the present findings can inform policy practice.

Although young people in Sweden report good health, there is an increase in self-reportedsymptoms. However, there is uncertainty regarding what these symptoms signify. Using interviewswith 15-year-olds, this research examines what the symptoms asked for in the Health Behaviorin School-Aged Children survey represent. The analyses takes inspiration from a performativeunderstanding of surveys. It demonstrates that while problems such as feeling low and nervousnessare reported as poor mental health, some participants refer them to deep-seated problems andothers to everyday challenges. The results points to the necessity of reporting from symptomscales with caution to avoid the pathologisation of everyday problems.

Although young people in Sweden report that they are in good health, thereis an increase in self-reported complaints such as feeling low and nervous.The complaints are reported as poor mental health. However, there is uncertainty regarding what these complaints signify. Using interviews withfifteen-year-olds, this research examines what the complaints asked for inthe Health Behavior in School-Aged Children survey represent in their lives.The analysis starts from a theoretical understanding of young people ashealth actors. It demonstrates that while the complaints represent everydayproblems for some young people, they represent deep-seated problems forothers. The results demonstrate the importance of acknowledging this duality otherwise everyday managing of life risk being pathologized and moreserious problems risk being overlooked.

Mätningar av ungas psykiska hälsa i Sverige visar på motstridiga uppgifter;unga markerar hög livstillfredsställelse samtidigt som de uppger besvär somnedstämdhet och nervositet. I forskningsrapporter och media rapporterasbesvären som psykisk ohälsa. Det är emellertid svårt att veta vad besvärenrepresenterar. Syftet med studien är att undersöka vad besvären som efterfrågas i enkäten Skolbarns hälsovanor representerar i ungas liv. Studienbaseras på intervjuer med ungdomar i årskurs 9 och en teoretisk förståelseav barn och unga som hälsoaktörer. Analysen visar att medan besvären representerar vardagliga problem för en del ungdomar, representerar de djupgående problem för andra. Resultaten pekar på betydelsen av att uppmärksamma den här dubbelheten. I annat fall riskerar vardagliga utmaningar attpatologiseras och mer allvarliga problem att förbises.

En stor del av den statistik som ligger till grund för medialt uppmärksammade rapporter om ökande psykisk ohälsa bland unga representerar inte alltid psykisk ohälsa utan övergående besvär kopplade till ungdomars vardagliga utmaningar. Detta kan leda till att ungas mående medikaliseras och att insatser som ska främja psykisk hälsa riskerar att hamna snett.

The present ethnographic study aims to explore how students reproduce and make use of a programme for social and emotional learning to create their own moral orders and routines for interaction in their local school context. The study demonstrates that the students made use of routines and norms conveyed by the programme to negatively position and exclude peers as well as to reproduce discourses of ‘blaming the victim’. The results highlight the inappropriateness of implementing a programme that strips emotions and behaviours of their meaning and that fails to situate emotions within students’ actual social and cultural contexts. The study demonstrates how such an approach relocates the responsibility for dealing with socially and culturally situated problems to the individual and denies teachers the opportunity to respond to problematic situations that give rise to emotions of anger and that emerge in social and cultural contexts at school.

This article focuses on a psycho-educational programme, DISA, currently practised in the Swedish schools to prevent girls from developing depressive symptoms. We draw on group interviews with schoolgirls to explore how they describe DISA and how an understanding of the programme is constructed through their arguments. We demonstrate how the girls’ version of DISA highlights a contradiction in the intervention that is traceable to the theoretical underpinnings of the programme and the mix of traditions — treatment and prevention — that constitute the intervention. We discuss problematic aspects of DISA and outline implications for policy practice.

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at three lower secondary schools in the northern Vietnamese cities of Hanoi and Haiphong, this article provides a contextually nuanced conceptualisation of Vietnamese school bullying. In doing so, the article not only addresses the lack of knowledge about Vietnamese school bullying, but also poses a number of critical questions about how school bullying is more widely understood. The descriptions of school bullying provided by teachers and students in this article suggest that school bullying cannot be reduced to the negative actions and aggressive intentionality that are so often used to define it in the mainstream literature. Instead, these actions are perceived as instruments for bullying that serve a function in the social and institutional context of the school. Furthermore, the descriptions provided by teachers and students challenge the view of meekness (the passive victim) as an individual personal trait. While they suggest that students who are perceived as meek in the social context of the school are most likely to be bullied, they also highlight that some students accede to the demands of their peers in order to escape being subjected to more direct negative actions. The study thus suggests that a key for understanding the role that bullying plays in students’ day-to-day life at school is to acknowledge the function of ‘meekness’ in bullying situations and to thus place more focus on the social and institutional context within which bullying occurs.