Adolescence: the challenge with death
There are many adolescents who do not limit themselves to challenging death in an unconscious and disguised way; but they express it in a manifest, blatant way, with suicide attempts. The trigger for this attitude may be the accidental death or suicide of a classmate: the empty desk in the classroom, the flowers near the photo, the funeral procession accompanied by beautiful memories or ritual music that are not enough to quell the feeling. anguish rather pushes us to develop other ailments: depression, desperation, feeling of annihilation… In other cases the suicidal feeling can be a disappointment in love, a failure at school, an argument with parents, a conflict between friends.
A situation of impotence and strong weakness in the face of the struggle of growing up that leads the adolescent to withdraw from the scene, with an absolute gesture that gives him the illusion of dominating life through death. For some it is the way to bring to the extreme consequences the existential doubts about life and death that urgently stabilize at this age, in a different reality, more realistic than the first great discomforts that emerged in childhood. In other cases it is a dangerous game in which to walk on a razor’s edge, as if by joking with death the adolescent were proving to himself that he is alive.
“Wanting to die” is often a call for help, which testifies to the difficulty of living and imagining the future. Perhaps as the psychiatrist Patrice Huerre states, many successful suicides actually represent the failure of a game that got out of hand to teenagers who, wanting to dominate their own lives, became the architects of their own death.
Whatever the underlying reason, declarations of intent should not be underestimated, even if they may sound like emotional blackmail, or macabre blackmail… they are always the signal of a malaise that requires listening, attention and appropriate care.
The idea of death is a recurring theme in the adolescent phase, and not always understood as a philosophical enigma: why we live – why we die, but also as a sub-conscious fantasy, which brings us back to the wonderful metaphor of the metamorphosis towards adulthood. However, when the conflicts linked to growth and separation processes are too distressing, even the beautiful metaphor of growth loses its symbolic meaning.
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