Mental Health and Psychological Illness in Adolescence

Abstract

Adolescence is the phase of life that marks the transition from childhood to adulthood. Two articles in this issue of Deutsches Arzteblatt International are dedicated to mental disorders in adolescence, with particular attention to the developmental perspective (1, 2). Adolescence begins with puberty, which is characterized by biological and physiological changes. This phase is associated with physical and sexual maturation. From the biological point of view, adolescence comprises the totality of somatic and mental changes whose most obvious expression is in bodily development and sexual maturation. From the psychological point of view, adolescence includes all of the individual processes that take place as the adolescent undergoes, contends with, and learns to cope with the somatic changes and society’s responses to them. From the sociological point of view, adolescence can be defined as an intermediate stage in which sexual maturity has already been reached in the biological sense (puberty), but the individual has not yet come into possession of the general rights and responsibilities that enable, and indeed compel, responsible participation in the fundamental processes of society (3). In temporal terms, adolescence is the phase of life roughly from age 12–13 to age 20–24. From the legal point of view, adolescence involves the progressive attainment of the legal status of an adult in different areas at different times. In Germany, persons become legally responsible for offenses they commit at age 14; permission to marry may be requested at age 16; legal majority is attained at age 18; and the applicability of juvenile delinquency law ends at age 21. The temporal boundaries for all of the processes just mentioned are imprecise in both directions (both upward and downward). The very beginning of adolescence can be defined relatively precisely as the time of menarche or first ejaculation, or else in relation to certain bodily changes, but the end of adolescence is highly variable and is much more subject to societal influences. In view of this fact, there is a current trend to define the end of adolescence by social criteria rather than as a specific age (4).