[The adolescent and diabetes: diabetes works me up"].
Diabetes, a chronic disease, is a heavy burden for adolescent patients. One has to bear this in mind, day after day. First of all, an adolescent does not wish to be diabetic and the doctor keeps reminding him that he is diabetic. Facing this inadequacy, the adolescent is reluctant to develop a confident relationship with his doctor and compels us to question our practice. Adolescence is a period of life when are revealed to the individual the problems of dependency often emerging into various pathologies of "acting", a period marked by the pressure of the sex drive. The process of subjectivation necessary to adolescence allows the appropriation of a sex-endowed body and of an autonomous and creative thought together with distance towards others and towards one's impulses. On the contrary, the treatment of diabetes increases passiveness and dependency and crystallizes the conflicts of adolescence. Some adolescents try to accommodate this relation of dependency by adopting either an opposing behaviour or other mental defences like splitting or denying. They are led to faking their log book or to deluding themselves about the recognition of their diabetes. This is a way of keeping their illness at a distance, of putting it aside and perhaps of protesting part of their narcissism. Of course, this difficulty of undergoing the treatment must be talked over with them in so far as what is valuable for diabetes control is not necessarily so for their psychic equilibrium at this stage of their life.
Guitard-Munnich
C
C
Service d'Endocrinologie et de Diabétologie, Hôpital Robert Debré, 48, Bd Sérurier, 75019 Paris, France.
D000293:Adolescent; D000296:Adolescent Psychiatry; D001294:Attitude to Health; D003220:Conflict, Psychological; D003922:Diabetes Mellitus, Type 1 / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000209:etiology
L'adolescent et le diabète: "le diabète me prend la tête".