If the above signs were not enough, the impact of the pandemic on children, adolescents and youth has brought to light the extent to which multiple vulnerabilities, insecurities, fears and conflicts are leaving their mark on the mental health of these generations. Various indicators, from the extreme tragedy of the suicides or suicide attempts to the demands for specialized care or the incidence of Eating Disorders, had offered worrying signals at levels that could not only be due to greater alertness to these phenomena, but rather to a basic malaise. A malaise that can be explained in many cases by situations of economic, residential or even food precariousness that are obvious to anyone who wants to attend to the repeated alarms launched by the most diverse social entities. The trauma of the covid has marked our time and has exacerbated all these wounds to such an extent that the Interterritorial Health Council was forced to rethink the entire mental health strategy last year. It did so with a commitment to increase the resources dedicated to it that, in the midst of many other insufficiencies of the health and educational systemshas not come true.
Insist on informing and raising awareness of this problem of epidemic dimensions to place it as one of the main concerns that we must face is an obligation to which this newspaper has promptly responded. There is nothing apocalyptic or irresponsible about this. There is something of that, on the other hand, in the behavior of those who only raise their voices in the face of events that hit us deeply, such as what happened to two 12-year-old girls in Sallent. That they do it without the prudence that, for example, the Col.legi de Periodistes de Catalunya has demanded in situations that may have complex and multiple explanations. And that demand immediate and drastic solutions, looking for scapegoats. Seeing only the relationship of young people with social networks as the root of the problem and -for example- the prohibition of mobile phones in the school environment as a solution is devastatingly simplistic. Perhaps an adolescent permanently connected to his group of friends through a screen suffers less from being incommunicado than another isolated and pointed out in the corner of a school playground, as was the case in other times that some long for uncritically.
The problem is multifactorial, not to say overflowing. From the erosion of expectations for the future to the pressure -indeed- of aesthetic and behavioral models expanded on social networks, the rearmed hostility and harassment towards the plurality of physiques, gender roles, origins or ideologies or the lack of listening and support from school and family. And the answers must be multiple. To begin with, with the knowledge of what is happening outside the radar of adults (through social research and intergenerational communication), moving on to the review of the roles of families and teachers as active educators. Without it, all the efforts to treat the broken in so many lives will be useless. But We cannot accept that, where all else fails, these resources do not exist. That educational centers feel overwhelmed and without resources, that mental health care only reaches, and dramatically insufficiently, cases of genuine emergency and not the prevention necessary to avoid reaching extreme situations.