Professor Gabriele Sani is a University Researcher at the Faculty of Medicine and Psychology of La Sapienza University of Rome and belongs to the Department of Neuroscience, Mental Health and Sense Organs. He is author and co-author of numerous national and international publications.
His research activity focuses mainly on the clinic of mood disorders, with particular reference to aspects related to bipolar disorder, temperament, course, rapid cyclicity, mixed states and agitated depression, pharmacological therapy of psychiatric disorders, the concept of comorbidity and suicide.
He has carried out continuous assistance activities since 2001, first as an assistant in training and then as a contractor until 2010, at the Sant’Andrea Hospital in Rome. Since 1999 he has been carrying out clinical and research activities at the Lucio Bini Center in Rome, directed by Dr. Athanasios Koukopoulos.
One of his latest books is “Adolescents and mood disorders” Il Mulino Editore.
Adolescence is one of the most articulated stages of life, during which it can happen that mood disorders enter the existence of young people. Anna, Stefano, Camilla are some of the teenagers we get to know in this book and their stories are the stories that can happen in every family.
Listening to young people, observing them carefully, means learning to welcome their and our suffering. Only starting from this welcome will we be able to build, together with doctors and psychologists, an effective therapeutic path that accompanies young people out of pathology and returns them to their lives.
The objective of this empirical research was to investigate adolescents, school, society, family to understand and grasp the critical issues, understand them and overcome them and the strengths in order to strengthen them. Their experiences become emblematic of situations belonging to many students from all over Italy.
This work was born in the perspective of the hope that we can collaborate to remove negativity, promote the formative processes of well-being, balance, serene management of school and social paths.
In the new generations we are witnessing an enormous contradiction: On the one hand there is a strong tendency to remain attached to situations of the past in the face of the uncertainty of a “liquid” future, on the other hand the economic crisis, technological innovations and the interweaving of world relations initiate great movements of human masses.
In all this, the School is today the ideal place to contrast the disvalues that cross society. Changing realities, fluctuating situations, weakening of regulatory processes, uncertainty about the future and lack of clarity on the objectives to be pursued contribute to creating risky behaviors of the new generations.
These conflicting messages together with social pressures can disorient children in the path of empowerment linked to the transition from the “society of children” to the “society of adults”.
Disorientation can turn into evolutionary discomfort, that is, the manifestation of the difficulties of performing the evolutionary tasks that are required of them by the social context for the achievement of personal identity and for the acquisition of the skills necessary for the satisfactory management of daily relationships.
These difficulties can manifest themselves as attitudes of distrust and closure towards the “public sphere”, school education, teachers, peers, oneself.
The hypotheses are that the indicators of discomfort manifest themselves in different ways for boys and girls, boys of different ages, boys residing in different housing contexts, boys attending different types of school, Kids who denote different levels of empathy towards other people’s problems and kids who consider different aspects important in explaining school failure.
Stories are typical real-world situations, where there are choices to make and decisions to make that don’t always conform to our “ideal” choices, but are assumed to be as close to them as possible.