World Health Day - Fanny Edenroth Cato researches young people's mental well-being
On the occasion of World Health Day and the European Commission's work to "break the stigma for those suffering from mental illness", attention is drawn here to research on how diagnosis stories about autism and ADHD, among other things, are increasingly used as an explanation for norm-breaking behaviors in our time and that stigmatization often affects both adults and young people, but takes different forms.
In a course book called Ungas villkor och vuxenblivande (2024, ed. Linnéa Bruno), Fanny Edenroth Cato has written a chapter titled “Neuropsychiatric diagnoses – stories, conditions and identity formation” about how gender, age and functionality become important in terms of people's stories about autism spectrum diagnoses and ADHD/ADD.
Fanny Edenroth Cato. Foto: Sören Andersson, Stockholms universitet.
Edenroth Cato discusses how power and influence look different depending on how power systems interact in stories about NPF diagnoses. There is a difference between being a child and an adult when you receive an NPF diagnosis, i.e. when in life it is given.
One's age is related to the influence one has over, for example, medication and other forms of interventions and how the diagnosis is understood; how information about it is communicated to one. There are qualitative studies in which adult women talk about their experiences of receiving an autism or ADHD diagnosis in adulthood and that it has helped to explain the shortcomings one blamed oneself for and thus relieved one.
For example, an autism diagnosis in adulthood can help to confirm that one's negative life experiences are related to the uncomprehending attitude of those around one and that one has therefore had to hide, so-called mask, autistic traits.
Facts
World Health Day is one of the UN's international days celebrated annually on 7 April under the leadership of the World Health Organization since 1950 to commemorate the organization's founding on 7 April 1948. The World Health Report is usually presented in conjunction with World Health Day.
Last updated: 2025-04-11
Source: Department of Child and Youth Studies