The Catalan public mental health system, especially for young people and adolescents, is under great strain. It is no consolation that, compared to the rest of the State, Catalonia is better off in this care field. It is not, because the professionals, who in recent months have raised various alarms in the form of reports and manifestos, still cannot cope. And families have to endure long waiting lists or, if they can, opt for private care –a visit with a psychologist or a psychiatrist costs between 50 and 120 euros–. Although the Generalitat has allocated more resources in recent years, the shortcomings remain notorious.

We live in a global context marked by emotional fragility: more than one billion people live with a mental health diagnosis, according to the World Health Organization. The situation is especially critical in classrooms: one in seven adolescents between 10 and 19 years old suffers from a mental disorder, and suicide is already the third leading cause of death among young people. Faced with this emergency scenario, preventive psychiatry focuses its attention on accessible, zero-cost interventions with an unexpected biological impact. The most powerful of all comes in the form of a book.

For a decade, the ideal young woman wore neutral tones, emptied her closets, and turned order, self-control, and productivity into an aesthetic. It was 2014 and Sophia Amoruso was unaware that a hashtag, #girlboss, would change everything. A hand extended to thehustle-culture, the culture of busyness, accompanied by a minimalist trend in dressing and decorating everything, drew an apparently self-sufficient femininity: a young woman who worked, was entrepreneurial, took care of her body, maintained an impeccable appearance and home and routines to the minute, always hand in hand with a specialty coffee (or a matcha latte, nowadays). Now, the pendulum seems to have swung back, after years of hustle-culture have caused an almost predictable burnout. Ribbons, pastel colors, and extravagant prints are arriving, a whole ode to kitsch, accompanied by a feeling of nostalgia and a need to recover play, to be little girls again. From the girlbossto the girl dinner (the least elaborate girl's dinner) or girl math (the mental gymnastics to justify an expense); from minimalism to maximalism; from the young woman who could do it all to the young woman who wants to play again. The whimsy-maxxing is one of the most recent expressions to define this phenomenon.

It is seven in the evening on an August Wednesday in Barcelona. Under the Arc de Triomf, hundreds of young people summoned by social media participate in a phenomenon that in recent weeks has jumped from TikTok to radio talk shows, television, and all kinds of conversation spaces. These are the aura battles, with the goal of farming aura, a practice as simple as performing actions designed to project an attractive, interesting, or simply different personality.

Meta avoids a historic trial and dodges the risk of reliving the 90s setback against tobacco companies. Mark Zuckerberg has agreed with 47 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories to pay approximately 17 billion dollars – about 14.3 billion euros – in exchange for dropping the case accusing the technology company of designing addictive social networks for minors and deceiving consumers about the safety of its products.

The historic trial against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, for the pernicious effects of its social networks on children and adolescents, forces the debate on young people's access to social networks to be reopened. The Spanish state is already studying a regulation to oblige digital platforms to establish effective controls to ban minors under 16 years of age; a proposal that the Minister of Youth and Childhood, Sira Rego, hopes will be approved after the holidays, according to statements made in a recent interview with the Europa Press agency. Spain would join a movement led by Australia, which banned access to networks for minors under 15 years of age in December. France also aspired to join the trend; although its law, which was to come into effect on September 1, was overturned by the Constitutional Council, alleging that the prohibition "did not provide the necessary legal safeguards to guarantee the right to respect for private life." The body also observed a clear conflict with the freedom of expression of the affected users.

The consequences of the social media business model may be catching up with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. The giant led by Mark Zuckerberg faces the first session of a trial this Tuesday that could place limits on what part of the US administration considers digital excesses. 29 US states, led by Colorado, California, New Jersey, and Kentucky, accuse the multinational of having introduced features and dynamics on its main platforms that generate addiction among children and adolescents.

Last year, 22 young people were admitted to the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Reference Unit (URPI) at Santa Catalina Hospital in Salt for suicide attempts. This is five more cases than the previous year. Behind each attempt lies immense suffering and despair, both for the young people at risk of suicide and for their families, who plead for more resources so that the authorities "don't let their children die" and provide more funding for the child and adolescent mental health care system. "When it comes to budget allocations, to making a serious commitment, it's always last in line. When a teenager is in crisis, a three-month wait for a psychologist in the public health system isn't just an administrative delay. It's an eternity that can have fatal consequences," laments journalist Sònia Cebrian, the mother of a child admitted to Santa Catalina Hospital in Salt for a suicide attempt. She was there for fifteen days and was discharged this Wednesday. "Healthcare and education professionals are overwhelmed and can't keep up with everything, and families are improvising stopgap measures that only allow them to stay afloat through struggle and isolation," Cebrian adds. The testimony of Sonia, as the mother of a teenager with a mental disorder and several suicide attempts, and that of Ingrid, as a young woman suffering this ordeal, exemplify the scale of a problem that carries a high emotional and financial cost for those who experience it and which, as Sonia says, "is needed." When the solution is a loan

"I felt very different from everyone else. I felt weak at school and developed anxiety and a lot of sadness," explains Mireia, now 23, who recalls managing anxiety and depression during adolescence. "I stayed in class, didn't go out to the playground, arrived late, and didn't feel like talking to my friends. Everything seemed normal, but internally I was unwell and I became isolated," she says about the anxiety attacks that appeared when she was fourteen and which she couldn't verbalize until she was sixteen. Although anxiety and depression are socially associated with adulthood, this reality also exists among children: it is estimated that between 10% and 20% of children and adolescents may have an anxiety disorder, according to the [unclear - possibly "warning" or "warning"]. Itersia Psychotherapy Center.

One of the many lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic is the need to care for and protect the mental health of young people, as their emotional distress has increased since the outbreak of the coronavirus six years ago. Although there is growing awareness of this problem and, consequently, more public resources are being allocated to address it, the data shows that there are still issues. a high number of Catalan students who continue to sufferBetween 2024 and 2025, for example, 30.6% of students aged 16 to 22 in Catalonia had suicidal thoughts; that is, almost a third had thought about suicide, considered it, or even planned it. Furthermore, one in four (25.9%) self-harmed, and one in ten (10.6%) attempted suicide.

Almost six years after the shock of the COVID-19 lockdown, indicators of young people's mental health are beginning to show signs of improvement. While it cannot be said that the effects of the crisis are over, those now between 15 (who were children in 2020) and 29 years old report having healthier habits and behaviors, although in most cases the results are still worse than before 2019. The latest results from the FAD Foundation and Mutua Madrileña, presented this Thursday in Madrid, indicate that three out of four young people surveyed consider their health to be "good or very good," a figure slightly below the 77% reported in 2019, but above the 54% in the survey conducted immediately after the pandemic ended.

There's a generation living with their backs against the wall and their hearts racing. A generation that has grown up surrounded by screens and uncertainties, that looks to the future with a weary smile and a question on their lips: "How can we learn to live when everything seems too much?"