It is therefore by means of these IT tools that Aurore Boulard began to give concrete expression to the idea suggested by Jean-Marie Gauthier, her thesis supervisor. It was a double-headed mission: first, to get a sufficient number of statements by teenagers to be able to constitute a basic corpus which could then be compared to those of depressed teenagers.
“The first objective of my thesis was to analyze the life-stories of depressed and hospitalized teenagers. But I was unable to affirm that these expressed themselves differently from a normal teenager because I had no data on the normal development of the life testimony of a young person! I therefore had to set up a control group and focus on the development of narrative skills of the average teenager”.
While the researcher feared that the students interviewed at the start might be reticent, they showed themselves to be more than willing to take part in the exercise. After 268 interviews, four main themes emerged: family, friends, the school environment and extra-curricular activities.
“It is not long before parents enter the equation”, she explains. “The family situation is explained within the first few words uttered by the youngsters. Then friends are mentioned, especially those they met at school and with whom they spend most of their days. The school environment is mentioned but not in the sense of ‘I love maths’, but rather to say ‘I love going to school because I get on well with my friends’. I describe this trend as social schooling”.
Divorce becomes a driving force
Aurore Boulard and linguist collegue Céline Poudat also observed the prevalence of a “positive personal development center”. 12-18 year olds tend to mention everything that is going well in their lives more than anything else. “Even when they have been confronted by a divorce, they do not present this fact as a negative but as an important event which they use as a force for understanding life”.
It is not the same for girls and boys. While the former attribute great importance to their family environment, the latter speak about what occurs outside of this cocoon. They mention friends, hobbies and all those activities which are not decided by their parents, the psychologist explains.
These observations are hardly surprising but the comparison of this data with that recorded from depressed youngsters is surprising on the other hand. You might expect that all 12-18 year olds talk about themselves in the same way. Nothing could be further from the truth. Important differences emerge both with regard to the language used and the topics that are discussed.
Aurore Boulard focused on two sub-groups: school-depressed teenagers and hospital-depressed teenagers. Each group presents its own specificities. The first group focusses on the “cognitive school”. “They concentrate their life stories on school, results, tests and relationships with the teachers”. Their school results are not necessarily brilliant but they show themselves to be very anxious. Is this because they are aware of a decline? The researcher puts forward this theory and forms another: “These teenagers have few friends at school, feel they are being judged by others and are confronted with family difficulties. When things are not going well at home and they have problems with their friends, where can they find the strength to try to hold on or even to succeed and try to have a job, to succeed at school”?
The depressed and hospitalized teenagers did not reveal any worries about friends or school. “It is as though family was their only environment”, she observes. While ‘normal’ youngsters mention the past, present and future, the comments of those who are hospitalized tend to be mainly set in the past.
