Agency among young people in marginalised positions: towards a better understanding of mental health problems

ABSTRACT

Agency in marginalised youth has been studied from various perspectives, yet the challenges that mental health problems pose for their agency remain poorly understood. Drawing on data from a study on youth transitions fractured by mental health problems, this study sheds light on this important issue. The data consists of 49 life story interviews with young adults. Using Ruth Lister’s four-dimensional taxonomy of agency, the analysis shows how everyday struggles with mental distress are entangled with the practices of the social security system, medical care, education, labour markets, and work life. It also reveals how emerging attempts at strategic agency can fail or flourish depending on the response of the social and structural context. If strategic agency is restricted by institutional practices, it will soon return to day-to-day struggling or become everyday resistance and cynicism towards the system. However, if the strategic agency is supported by institutional practices, a genuine path out of distress emerges. The paper suggests that taking seriously the experiences of mental distress and situating them in a specific socio-political context is essential for understanding youth agency today.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• depression
• mental health
• NEET
• exclusion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In this context, it is worth noting that gender-related factors presumably play a significant role in shaping youth transitions fractured by depression; for example, young women end up on depression-related work disability twice as often as young men (Ervasti et al. 2013), yet the high NEET rates among young men imply that men’s mental distress does not necessarily become recognised as depression, staying hidden instead (Rikala 2018). Moreover, it has been reported that mental distress is manifested differently in young men and women (Magnusson and Marecek 2012). A full analysis of this question, however, is beyond the scope of this article.

2 In recent decades, the Finnish welfare regime has been subject to drastic changes that have been described as a transition from Nordic welfare state towards market liberalism, and ‘permanent austerity’. Although benefit levels are still relatively generous, the provision of welfare according to workfare principles has pushed the least adherent to employment beyond the range of benefits and thus amplified the widening socio-economic gap (Kvist et al. 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Academy of Finland [250128771].