ABSTRACT Background The proportion of young people suffering from poor mental health is on the increase, including in Scandinavian countries. This increase seems paradoxical, as Scandinavian countries are among those with the lowest degree of material deprivation, economic inequality, and social exclusion. Purpose The aim of the study was firstly to investigate, on an individual level, young people’s own sense-making of poor mental health: their experiences of vulnerability and their explanations of the factors leading to vulnerability and mental health problems. Secondly, the purpose was to further analyse the young people’s experiences by combining them with ideal-typical conceptualisations of social pathologies and an overview of recent structural developments in the educational and social system. Methodology The study was based on explorative, in-depth, focus group interviews conducted in two large Danish cities with 17 young people aged 18–28 years. The interviewees had previously struggled with mental health problems and, on these grounds, had volunteered as ‘youth experts’ to help other young people. As part of the explorative approach, the interviewees themselves thematically clustered the different factors that they considered had led to vulnerability and substantiated the connection within each cluster. Data analysis followed these initial-coded clusters. Findings The analysis of the three broad themes that emerged – Expectations and performance pressure, Self-perception and self-doubt, and Taboo feelings – identified a substantial gap between expectation and lived experience. The expectations were of an abundance of life and educational options, and a dominating discourse that young people in Scandinavia can become whatever they wish. These expectations were in stark contrast with the lived experiences of feeling pressure to perform and an awareness of the limitation of the opportunities for those who fail to perform, within a landscape of recent structural changes. It was the gap between the discourse of the abundance of options on the one hand and highly regulated actual opportunities on the other that seemed to be the common denominator in the young people’s stories about the distress they felt. The societal discourse of almost endless options appeared to cause the young people in this study to individualise the responsibility for success as well as failure. Conclusions The study suggests that the gap between individualised expectations and a lived reality that does not measure up to these expectations could be a central contributing factor in explaining young people’s experiences of poor mental health.

中文翻译：

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青少年心理健康：探索期望与体验的差距

摘要 背景 精神健康状况不佳的年轻人的比例正在增加，包括在斯堪的纳维亚国家。这种增长似乎自相矛盾，因为斯堪的纳维亚国家属于物质匮乏、经济不平等和社会排斥程度最低的国家。目的 本研究的目的首先是在个人层面上调查年轻人自己对心理健康状况不佳的理解：他们的脆弱经历以及他们对导致脆弱和心理健康问题的因素的解释。其次，目的是通过将年轻人的经历与社会病态的理想典型概念和教育和社会系统近期结构发展的概述相结合，进一步分析年轻人的经历。方法 该研究基于探索性、在丹麦的两个大城市对 17 名 18-28 岁的年轻人进行了深入的焦点小组访谈。受访者之前曾与心理健康问题作斗争，并因此自愿成为“青年专家”来帮助其他年轻人。作为探索性方法的一部分，受访者自己按主题对他们认为导致脆弱性的不同因素进行了聚类，并证实了每个聚类内的联系。数据分析遵循这些初始编码的集群。结果 对出现的三个广泛主题的分析——期望和表现压力、自我认知和自我怀疑以及禁忌情绪——确定了期望和生活经验之间的巨大差距。人们期望有丰富的生活和教育选择，斯堪的纳维亚的年轻人可以随心所欲地成为主流话语。在最近结构性变化的背景下，这些期望与感受到执行压力的生活经历以及意识到未能执行的人的机会有限的生活经历形成鲜明对比。一方面是关于丰富选择的话语与另一方面是高度管制的实际机会之间的差距，这似乎是年轻人关于他们所感受到的痛苦的故事的共同点。几乎无穷无尽的选择的社会话语似乎导致本研究中的年轻人将成功和失败的责任个性化。