Lola Álvarez, child and adolescent psychotherapist: "With self-harm, adolescents distance themselves from the psychological pain in which they live. They can become very addictive"

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• Parenting From pregnancy to adulthood, passing through the dreaded adolescence: books to better accompany (and understand) our children

Adolescence should bring experts and parents to our heads, because books about this stage are piling up in bookstores.

Knowing what goes through our children's heads at that age when everything seems to go wrong worries families, so they use manuals to understand them.

The goal is to understand that they diverge, because they must, and that such divergence is necessary for their transformation into healthy adults.

Now, the child and adolescent psychotherapist

Lola Álvarez

, who already addressed these issues in

'But what's wrong with you?'

, deals in a new book with a disturbing intersection for many parents: that of adolescence and mental health.

She just posted

'What Have I Missed?'

(Planeta, 2024), a guide to detect behavioral problems, anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicidal ideations, etc. in our children.

Álvarez has a degree in Pedagogy, a master's degree in Psychoanalytic Observational Studies and a member of the Association of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapists of the United Kingdom, the British Psychotherapy Foundation and the British Psychoanalytic Council.

With more than 30 years of experience in this field, she works and lives in London, from where she assists us by phone.

He says that his book will help parents identify the signs of problematic situations and that, sometimes, those signs are secrecy, declines in school performance, changes in behavior... But isn't all of that normal in the adolescence?

What is the border? You have to be aware of how many things happen to them simultaneously and if, in reality, they are just normal changes of adolescence, you have not lost anything by digging a little.

For example, one thing is for them not to study much, and another for them to stop doing things they used to do.

If you are no longer interested in playing basketball, but have switched to another sport or being with your friends, good;

but if there is no explanation, we must try to find out what is going on in his head.

And that is achieved with a conversation, because parents do not have to be detectives.

If you abandon that activity because you spend hours and hours in your room, and on top of that you communicate very little and start to fail, something is happening here.

You may have depression.

A secretive and lazy teenager is different from a dejected one.

There are now more and more serious mental health disorders in children and adolescents.

Why and what are they? Adolescents are more vulnerable than before.

Technology and the social change it has brought about have a lot to do with this.

Now they have a split identity: the flesh and blood one and the virtual one.

Everything that happens on networks or in video games has an impact on how they feel on a daily basis, even at very basic levels, such as whether or not they are in a WhatsApp group.

They have a parallel existence that works 24 hours a day and gives them no respite.

From this a social change has been derived, because as a result of technology everyone explains their life and everything has a label: they do not say 'I am a little depressed', but 'I have depression' or 'I have anxiety', in a clear tendency to the pathologization of habitual moods.

So, do they give a disease name to what is not? Yes.

Adolescents claim to be affected by disorders around which they create an identity.

It is one thing to be sad for a few days because of a breakup and another to suffer from depression.

Parents have an essential role here, because if the environment adapts to this way of existing, it is possible that a teenager ends up having a real problem.

That is why one of my objectives in this book is to differentiate what is real and what is a product of networks.

The abuse of certain terms produces a trivialization of mental health.

A girl told me in consultation that she had "anxiety" and "body dysmorphia."

What happened to her, in reality, is what happened to many: she just wanted to be thinner.

This confusion is worrying. You reason that this occurs because many self-diagnose even with a test they take from the Internet, without a professional to intervene.

Before 'being crazy' was a reason for ridicule.

Are they romanticizing it now? Yes, due to the influence of the networks.

Sometimes,

They feel that a disorder is the only thing that can make them interesting and they also see how their idols talk about their mental health problems on the internet.

This normalization provides visibility but also trivializes them.

Before, we teenagers had a poster in the room, but now there is more interaction with celebrities, they know everything about their private lives and seek to identify more with them.

If people with 'glamour' have a disorder, they become special, sensitive, and interesting.

There is a 'glamourization' of 'tortured souls' that trivializes real problems.

It is a perverse circle.

Adolescents with a consolidated identity do not need these 'glamour' extras, but others with low self-esteem, who do not have it or any other way to shine or stand out, cling to this because it gives them a point of interest.

It is what we have always called 'attracting attention', but in a more sophisticated way.

Planet

There are so many books on parenting that it seems like being a father and mother is a profession. I agree.

I have written these books to give parents confidence, to tell them that they can raise their children.

You don't need to train to have them, many times it is a matter of common sense.

But it is true that now there is a big generational leap: fathers and mothers in their 50s with children who are digital natives and have no idea what it means to be a teenager with technology involved.

Now they have access to a lot of content and information and that gives us more work.

They have pressures that we do not experience and it is difficult for us to understand it.

Tell me about self-harm. They are much more common now.

Before you were sad but you accepted the situation.

You talked to your friends or your brothers, you went out... We accepted in a more natural way that life is ups and downs, but now they see an idyllic life on the networks.

Self-harm provokes a physiological reaction that makes them feel better: the physical pain distances them from the psychological pain in which they live.

The contagion factor has contributed to the popularity of mental disorders.

There are websites dedicated to self-harm (such as anorexia) and many copy these behaviors because they are looking for a certain drama.

Pain can be 'glamorous' and sometimes it even generates competition between them.

However, it is true that the majority of adolescents who self-harm have a real problem. It is important to find an alternative to self-harm when the adolescent feels that urge. We must look for something to replace it.

One of the solutions is to put a rubber band on your wrist, stretch it and release it to hurt yourself a little.

They may also resort to looking at a photo, petting their pet, leaving their room... Anything that stops them from reaching for the razor.

We recommend to parents that there is nothing in the room that they could cut themselves with and that they search it in their presence.

While they are looking for something, perhaps that impulse has passed and seeing that they conquer it is positive.

There are teenagers who do it every day and it is about training so that as much time as possible passes between one self-injury and another.

It's like a drug, very addictive.

It is necessary that there is a desire on the part of the adolescent to stop doing it because if not, we must assume that she is not going to stop doing it.

In most cases, just by talking about it in therapy the behavior decreases. There is an inertia that links self-harm and suicide.

Is this association correct? The vast majority of those who self-harm do not commit suicide, fortunately.

There is no progressive relationship between the two.

Those who commit suicide have endured many years of depression without help and have lost hope in life.

Processes tend to chain themselves, such as deaths around them, not studying what they wanted, experiencing attacks, etc.

Adolescent self-harm is not an inevitable path to suicide and most occur within a specific period of time.

'Barcode', 'outch' and other keywords used online by young people who self-harm

Dropdown

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March 1 is World Self-Harm Awareness Day, a day that has coincided with the launch of a campaign on the language and symbols that teenagers use on the internet to talk about self-harm.

This is an action based on

'The media representation of minors' self-harm in the media and networks'

, a study carried out by the Comkids research group at the Rey Juan Carlos University, led by Professor of Advertising

Esther Martínez Shepherd

.

Based on the tracking they have done through networks, the researchers conclude that there is a digital community made up of young people who self-harm.

In it they find

emotional support

but, be careful, this accompaniment is also harmful and represents a means of

feedback

.

Their communication is conveyed through

coded words and images

, with which adolescents 'secretly' spread their self-destructive behaviors.

The most frequent are these:

• Barcode

  : This is an image that represents the keyword 'barcode' as a metaphor for cuts caused by self-harm.

• Beans

  : The image of beans describes the appearance of the hypodermis, the least superficial layer of the skin, after receiving a deep wound.

• Kitten blades

  : the romanticization of self-harm is latent with this symbol.

  The cutters and blades are camouflaged with a childish and flirtatious aesthetic.

• Ouch

  : In English, 'Ouch', 'Ouchie' and 'Ouchietwt' is a colloquial expression to express pain.

• Trasto

  or trastoamigo: 'trasto' is a word used by the self-harm community in Spanish.

  It is an abbreviation of "disorder" or "disordered" and can be used in conjunction with other words, such as "disordered friends."

• Teenagers

• Maternity