They Don’t Need a Diagnosis. They Need to Be Seen.
Cesare Maria Cornaggia - Faced with youth malaise, adults are often confused, thinking they are necessarily dealing with a pathology. We are surrounded by analysis—not only of world geopolitics but also of this youth malaise—that speaks of incommunicability and a lack of prospects. We could quote the Italian singer Giorgio Gaber, who said, “It is a great void / that surrounds you and blocks you.” We could also recall Edoardo Bennato with his song about “scholars, doctors, and wise men,” which mocked the pompous and presumptuous nothingness of those who make such analyses and invited young people to escape.
Is this the only approach? Instead, we can try to “open up the possibility for the person to come into contact with their deepest parts, to recognize them and open them up to the impact of reality as the totality that lies before us.” The choice is ours.
There is currently much talk of so-called “youth malaise” and the disorientation of many adults in the face of it, along with the all-too-frequent news events to which we are all spectators. Today, we are dealing with something so quantitatively and qualitatively different from the past that it is clear the nature of what we are facing is completely unknown. The psychological and educational parameters that have guided us in past years are no longer helpful.
From a psychological point of view, we struggle to interpret this discomfort. The “symptom,” which we have always considered the gateway to the depths of a person's soul, now appears far more complex to decipher and, in general, seems more like a rupture than a question. Precisely for this reason, I believe we must affirm that the centrality of the issue cannot be separated from that of language and relationships, because we are faced with a question that resists linguistic translation.
In my opinion, this happens for three essential reasons. First, emotions are not recognized, either by those who wish to express them or by those who wish to listen. Second, and closely related to the first, the body—as phenomenological terminology has taught us—remains Körper (an object body) and does not engage as Leib (a lived, relational, dialoguing body). Finally, the third reason is that we are faced with a decline of the symbolic, that dimension of language that refers to an order of shared meanings and goes beyond the mere sign.
Consider the language of today's rappers, which could be well-defined by what Giorgio Gaber stated in his brilliant and prophetic 1998 song “Il Grido”: “It is a great void / that surrounds you and blocks you / as if it were a cry / in search of a mouth ... It is a rage / that overwhelms you and blocks you.”
The mouth, in this case, is the language that fails to communicate the cry, because the cry and its language are only possible within a relationship of acceptance and non-judgment. Rappers, on the other hand, tell us that even though they have everything, they have nothing, because the essential is missing and desire remains isolated.
Young people themselves often use complicated, cryptic language because they feel a need to remain misunderstood behind a barrier of incommunicability, one they sense has been erected by distant adults. They have also internalized that naming emotions means disturbing these adults, so they choose silence or anger as alternative codes—perhaps the only ones available to them. But if anger speaks for them, it does not speak about them.
Faced with all this, what can we, as apparent adults, ask ourselves? While recalling that human restlessness and the search for meaning are the same for every generation, we can refer to two essential points. First, the self is irreducible; that is, no condition can reduce a person to their biological or psychological antecedents (as the theologian Luigi Giussani called them). What we urgently need to cultivate is self-awareness: a clear and loving perception of oneself that allows us to embrace who we are in the awareness of our destiny. Second, a person finds themselves only in a living encounter, in a presence that makes their heart burst.
Therefore, when confronted with this discomfort, we can affirm that we are not dealing with something “pathological” or a “disease,” but rather with the ontological need to be loved and recognized for who we are, in all our parts, without the weight of blame or a lack of prospects. Only in this way, as Giussani said, can we avoid neglecting the self (which so often shines through the “malaise” we complain about) and experience movement in the world not “to be loved,” but “because we are loved.”
However, if we are faced with something ontological, our attention—for those of us involved in care or education—must not focus on the “illness.” Instead, it must focus on creating the possibility for a person to come into contact with their deepest parts, to recognize them, and to open them up to the impact of reality as the totality that stands before us.
In light of these provocations, a few key words come to mind as a starting point: curiosity about the other; recognition (“I see all of you, not your illness”); the irreducibility of the self (there is no condition in which it cannot be evoked, and our limits are the very place of possible encounter); standing before pain (which is a resource); judgment without blame; and closeness (being-there, because we all define ourselves in relationship).
Fundamentally, this is not so different from the educational method indicated by Giussani, which must start from experience by valuing the questions and needs of the self. From there, it involves educating young people to look at all of reality without censorship, proposing meaningful human companionship, and calling them to a serious personal verification—that is, to evaluate whether what they encounter corresponds to the needs of their heart.
A young person’s provocation and their request, conveyed through the cryptic language they use, challenges us to put all this into practice rather than to simply identify new pathologies.
Cesare Maria Cornaggia is a psychiatrist and associate professor at the University of Milan-Bicocca, known for his work in neuropsychiatry, cognitive rehabilitation, and university education. He graduated in Medicine and Surgery in 1979 and specialized in Psychiatry in 1983. He has worked in both Italy and Germany and, over the years, has directed and coordinated various hospitals, particularly for people with neurological disabilities or severe mental disorders.
The author has not revised the text and its translation.