ABSTRACT
The whole subject renewal policy, in which health and life skills are adopted as one of three interdisciplinary subjects in Norwegian schools, is based on a specific understanding of the challenges encountered by children and young people that are often referred to as ‘youth at risk’. The notion of a kind of democratisation of risk among youth is historically understandable, I conclude. At the same time, it is also partly ideological, as allegedly universal solutions to the problem of suffering among youth, like acquiring health and life skills through education, runs the risk of viewing the question of mental health issues as an individual problem – the lack of proper coping and mastery – where the solution is cognitivistic resilience and life mastery. However, the mental health of young people is deeply intertwined with societal, economic and cultural tendencies, and cannot be fixed quickly and cheaply.
