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Even under stable family and societal conditions, an adolescent's passage into young adulthood is frought with challenges. As adolescents move away from the prescribed moorings of family to stand on their own, they experience heightened vulnerability, loneliness and insecurity. Simultaneously, adolescents are bombarded by internal pressures and simulations. Under these pressures, they seek experiences and feelings of power, peer affiliation and certainty. Under the additional pressures of living in a severely stressed society, adolescents' passages into settled young adulthood are filled with risk: In these circumstances, with parents burdened and preoccupied themselves and unable to function as proper societal anchors, their teenaged children begin their experiments with parental separation. Society, riddled with dangers and a fragile infrastructure, fails to provide a safety net of parental substitutes or suitable avenues for identity formation. This leaves adolescents vulnerable to malignant leadership and group pressures as they seek defined roadmaps for their development. This presentation describes an adolescent's normal development trajectory and the derailment of this passage under severe societal stress.
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