Do you know how many new drugs appear every year? And how many times a teenager checks her Smartphone a day?
New ones appear 100-120 a year, they are already more than 700 in total. How do you cope with such an invasion, and so differentiated, of drugs? In fact, many of these substances, synthetic or not, is unknown to the authorities, therefore not prohibited (even dogs do not smell them) and, more serious, unknown even for doctors who have to treat those who are left behind. Among these, adolescents: at least eight percent result in having used non-classical substances. Half of the consumption should however be allocated to people over 35 years.
ADOLESCENCE AND DEPENDENCIES
Now, the age of adolescence is the most delicate. In this age adult brain structures are formed and consolidated, which can be influenced – sometimes forever – by negative experiences and addictions. Including, today, technology addictions: smart phones, computers, social networks. “God only knows what they’re going to do to the brains of our kids,” said Facebook co-founder Sean Parker, perhaps alerted by his own creation.
THE MIND IS MODELING
“Adolescence is not just a space for psychological transition, as has always been said, but it must also be understood from a neurobiological point of view: from 13 to 25 years old the brain will be modeled and assumed the adult structure, acquiring cognitive skills , relational and emotional that will remain substantially stable in the rest of life “. Claudio Mencacci , director of the Mental Health and Neuroscience Department of the Fatebenefratelli-Sacco hospitals, wrote a book, which now presents, together with the co-author, the psychiatrist Giovanni Migliarese , responsible in the same structure of the Center for deficit disorder of attention and neurodevelopmental disorders in the young adult.
DEEP PARENTS
Says Migliarese , in claiming that the volume «When everything changes. The psychic health in adolescence ” (Pacini publisher, pages 240, euro 18) is for everyone, not only for specialists, who have been pushed to write it down by parents ‘ requests , lost in front of an unprecedented reality in which their children sink and their unknown land. “In Italy we have about 8 million and 200 thousand young people between 12 and 25 years – continues Mencacci -. Of these, ten per cent, so well eight hundred thousand, declare themselves dissatisfiedof their life, their friendship, family relationships and their health. It is to these eight hundred thousand young people that we need to pay attention by helping to recognize all those factors that can favor the onset and the maintenance of psychic pathologies “. If these are taken early in treatment, excellent clinical responses can be achieved thanks to the high plasticity of the brain in the adolescent period. The same plasticity that makes distortions easier. “It is precisely in adolescence that the first signs give the majority of psychic pathologies of adulthood,” says psychiatrist Migliarese.
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