Ungdomar och psykisk ohälsa : En kvalitativ studie om psykisk ohälsa hos ungdomar utifrån socialsekreterares perspektiv

Sammanfattning: Social workers meet adolescents with mental illness daily. An increase in adolescents with mental illness has been noticed and there are several contributing factors to this. It is of interest to understand which factors contribute to adolescents’ mental illness to be able to help the adolescents and pay attention to where the problems originate. The purpose of this essay is to examine social workers professional view on mental illness in adolescents.  Data has been collected through qualitative semi-structured interviews with five social workers from five different municipalities. Systems theory, salutogenic perspective and a sense of coherence (SOC) were used as the theoretical framework for the thematic data analysis. The results shows that social workers see the school and the family as the biggest protective factors but also the risk factors for adolescents’ mental illness. The results highlighted the fact that when there are problems at home, problems can degenerate at school and vice versa.