A teenager drinks too much, or is high on cannabis most of the time. Another self-harms, slashing his arms with a razor. A third starves herself to a painful thinness. Another locks himself away in his bedroom, obsessively playing games on the internet.
What is going on here? We tend to label these teenagers in terms of their problem behaviour: alcohol abuse, drug addiction, self-harming, anorexia, gaming addiction and so on.
But scratch the surface, and very often it will turn out that these apparently dysfunctional behaviours are not so much the problem per se, as an effort to manage an otherwise overwhelming distress and anxiety. And in some ways, these strategies work.
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