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Lucy Foulkes’ Coming of age, released in 2024, offers a refreshing exploration of adolescence, steering away from the alarmist, crisis-driven narratives prevalent today. It's a pleasure to read a book where the author clearly appreciates and respects adolescents. This stands in contrast to the current cultural climate, with swings between panic over an ‘adolescent mental health crisis’ and, on the other end, strict, often nonsensical behavioural controls in schools.
Foulkes, an academic psychologist at Oxford University, moves away from this black-and-white picture of adolescent life, offering a balanced view on this pivotal life stage, bringing it to life in her pages that often read like fiction. For us as psychoanalytic child and adolescent psychotherapists, Coming of age resonates, as it addresses themes like identity formation, separation from family, and friendship dynamics. Though Foulkes writes from a psychological rather than psychoanalytic perspective, her insights offer plenty of material for therapeutic thinking. Through her in-depth interviews with 23 adults recalling their adolescent years, she captures how teenage experiences shape not only our identities but also our most powerful memories.
I first encountered Lucy Foulkes through her earlier book, What mental health is … and what it isn't (2022), which I also recommend. That book examined how the rise in mental health awareness, despite its positive impacts, has led to unintended consequences like over-diagnosis or a quick jump to self-diagnosis – something I was starting to notice in my own clinical work, which Rachel Acheson and I explored in an article (Acheson & Papadima, 2023). Foulkes’ writing combines academic clarity and a fiction-like, readable style. She consistently emphasises, in her two books and in articles she has written in between (e.g., Foulkes, 2023, 2024; Foulkes & Andrews, 2023), that keeping in mind the complexities of
mental health and a