La radicalisation, un nouveau symptôme adolescent ?

Abstract

BackgroundFor over two years, in Strasbourg (France) the teams of the University Department for Children and Adolescent Psychiatry and from the “Maison des adolescents” have been facing the issue of radicalization in their daily work. The aim of this paper is to specify the psychological vulnerabilities and the psychopathological mechanisms underlying indoctrination processes in today's teenagers. MethodsWe used clinical observations of about twenty-five long-term follow-ups of adolescents who were already radicalized or supposedly at risk of radicalization. All underwent individual or familial therapy with child and adolescent psychiatrists between December 2014 and November 2016 in Strasbourg, either at the University Department for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry or at the “Maison des adolescents”, which is a primary care center for any adolescent issues. ResultsOur analyses support the hypothesis that radical engagement often soothes at first a preexisting psychological distress. The radicalization is more than a sociopolitical issue and more than the encounter of the adolescence process with a radical offer. Hence, in our group of adolescents, we have observed psychotic disorders, conversive and posttraumatic stress disorders and mainly depressive and narcissistic vulnerabilities. Our work reveals a variety of risk factors that are related to either family dynamics (fragility of inner family relationships, dysfunction of parental figures, parental depression or personality disorder…), or to individual fragilities (traumatic events during childhood, undiagnosed ADHD, depression, conduct disorder, etc.). Struggling against melancholic threats, the initial relief caused by the radicalization frequently contains paranoid mechanisms, which may lead to a violent acting out for some of these adolescents. ConclusionThe majority of radicalization processes in adolescence, understood as a new symptom in teenagers, justify a psychiatric evaluation including a broad assessment of childhood psychological vulnerabilities, in order to design a targeted personalized care program. More studies are required in order to further characterize the personal and parental vulnerabilities and underlying psychopathological mechanisms of radicalization processes in adolescence and to evaluate the efficiency of targeted care programs.