Too much or never enough: mattering and adolescent ill-being. revisiting social pathologies through the schism between hyper-significance and invisibility

Adolescent illbeing is often framed as individualized mental health problems through medicalized language. Drawing on Durkheim’s concepts of regulation and disintegration and Prilleltensky’s theory of mattering, this article reconceptualizes adolescent ill-being as socially produced pathologies. Based on free-narrative interviews with adolescents across diverse social and structural contexts, we identify two central analytical axes, over-regulation and disintegration, and develop a typology of four ideal-typical forms of adolescent ill-being. Each reflects a distinct configuration of normative and structural pressures, social positioning, and anti-mattering. While existing literature has primarily focused on high-performing adolescents, particularly girls, our findings reveal pronounced gendered and socioeconomic differences in how ill-being emerges and is lived. Shifting the analytical focus from ontology, asking what characterizes social pathologies to epistemology, asking how they are produced across contexts, the article addresses an epistemological gap in the literature, demonstrating that adolescent ill-being is not one pathology, but patterns of socially differentiated ones.