"En ribba att nå" - Unga kvinnors förkroppsligade stress i en neoliberal och könad kontext

Abstract

Negative trends in adolescent mental and subjective health are indicated in Sweden and worldwide. Self-reported mental and subjective health complaints such as pain, sleeping problems, anxiety, and various stress-related problems seem to have increased over time among older adolescents, especially among girls. In this article we aim to highlight and problematise teenage girls' and young women’s perceived and embodied stress and mental health in relation to what we define as a gendered and neoliberal social context – an issue and approach which we believe is relevant to both public health research and girlhood studies. To achieve this, we bring together historical, sociocultural, political and health related aspects that capture the complexities and contradictions of the phenomenon and problem of “young girls’ stress”. We use this conceptual framework in our empirical analysis of young women, embodiment and mental illness. The study was conducted at a youth health centre in northern Sweden. Our empirical material is based on individual and repeated qualitative interviews with sixty-five young women aged 16 to 25 years who had sought help for stress-related problems. The analysing procedure was guided by an inductive research approach, which implies that the results are grounded in interview data. Discourseoriented qualitative content analysis was used as the primary analysis method. We present the results and discussion under headings such as “A bar to reach – the pressure to perform perfectly”, “Self-control – part of the gender orders”, “Building a self/I of value”, “Gendered emotion work”, “Embodiment of the life on the edge”, and “Individualised femininity and resistance”. Finally we emphasise that the social context and gended processes are of importance for how we understand, explain and respond to young women’s embodied experiences of distress and mental illness.