(Des)ajustamento psicológico e expressões idiomáticas na adolescência

Abstract

Adolescence is a period of amazing developmental advances but also of some vulnerabilities. With this in mind, modern societies have been creating services to support the development of adaptive pathways through adolescence. Some authors have drawn attention to the need of establishing bridges between the common-sense language used by adolescents to express their psychological/psychosocial adjustment problems and the technical-scientific language of ‘psych’ professionals. In this context, the objectives of this work are to explore the association between two idioms of distress common in Portugal, “suffering from the nerves” (SN) and “having personal problems” (PP), and several dimensions of psychological symptomatology common in the scientific literature on mental health, in adolescents and accounting for possible gender differences. A sample of 12th grade students in schools of Southern Portugal responded to two instruments: a personal data questionnaire, which included two items related to self-perceptions of SN and PP, and the Brief Symptom Inventory. The results suggest that self-perceptions of SN and PP are significantly correlated and that the correlation is stronger in females. Results also suggest that, for both genders, the SN stronger correlation is with anxiety. Self-perception of PP reveals, on the one hand, stronger correlations with psychoticism, depression, paranoid ideation and interpersonal sensitivity in males and, on the other hand, correlations with depression and paranoid ideation in females. Finally, anxiety proved to be the best predictor of NS in both genders; and the best predictors of PP are psychoticism, in boys, and paranoid ideation, in girls. The results are discussed in light of the literature on psychological (mal)adjustment in adolescence and on idioms of distress.