Reacción a "Mental disorders may have some ‘contagion’ effect in adolescents, Finnish study finds"

The study aims to measure the risk of being diagnosed with a mental disorder when there are one or more classmates (in what would correspond to the first year of high school in Spain) who are already diagnosed. It is an ambitious and well-designed population-based research that collects data from more than 700,000 citizens over 18 years and until 2019. The results are significant, although the risk rates are low, and explain them by an increased awareness of distress in adolescents who were already suffering without being diagnosed, by the environmental influence on the most susceptible or by the ‘emotional contagion’ that can occur in close relationships.

The influence of the social context on the expression of mental distress is a particularly important aspect in adolescence, when identifications and differences with people in the environment are key in the personal development of young people. This research highlights this in the case of classmates and just ends in 2019, before the confinement due to the covid-19 pandemic and the popularisation of some networks such as TikTok. Since then, and in the context of these social changes, adolescents give evidence of their discomfort through behaviours that are more easily ascribed as ‘mental disorders’, an issue that has to make us think about what educational, family and environmental measures we can take, beyond the purely psychological or psychiatric ones.