Youth studies have traditionally devoted little attention to youth’s emotions. However, according to international [WHO, 2024. Mental health of adolescents report. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-mental-health; Lancet, 2025] and Italian dataset [ISTAT, 2023. Report BES. Il benessere equo e sostenibile in Italia], anxiety couples with a growth of mental health problems across youth, ranging from depression to other forms of distress. This article observes the emergence of discourses on mental health and a generalised emotional vulnerability as constitutive of the young persona, based on exploratory empirical research on TikTok. We firstly identify emerging trends by analysing the frequency of relevant hashtags that appeared during the two years of the post-pandemic period. Secondly, we conduct Qualitative Content Analysis of videos semantically related to mental health. We then adopt a zoom-in strategy to analyse one particular video and its comments. This two-step analysis illustrates how young people express their anxieties, suggesting the normalisation of mental health discourses (a), the use of posts on mental health to create a community of like-minded peers (b), and a strategic use of such expressions of anxiety in order to increase visualisation of their profile (c).
#You_are_not_alone: youth and the emergence of discourses on mental health in Italy
sebastiano benasso;
2026-01-01
Abstract
Youth studies have traditionally devoted little attention to youth’s emotions. However, according to international [WHO, 2024. Mental health of adolescents report. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-mental-health; Lancet, 2025] and Italian dataset [ISTAT, 2023. Report BES. Il benessere equo e sostenibile in Italia], anxiety couples with a growth of mental health problems across youth, ranging from depression to other forms of distress. This article observes the emergence of discourses on mental health and a generalised emotional vulnerability as constitutive of the young persona, based on exploratory empirical research on TikTok. We firstly identify emerging trends by analysing the frequency of relevant hashtags that appeared during the two years of the post-pandemic period. Secondly, we conduct Qualitative Content Analysis of videos semantically related to mental health. We then adopt a zoom-in strategy to analyse one particular video and its comments. This two-step analysis illustrates how young people express their anxieties, suggesting the normalisation of mental health discourses (a), the use of posts on mental health to create a community of like-minded peers (b), and a strategic use of such expressions of anxiety in order to increase visualisation of their profile (c).
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