Early professional intervention can help break the cycle when the school system ends up labelling non-academic students as failures, pushing them towards idleness, experts believe.

Clinical psychologist Roberta Farrugia Debono told The Sunday Times of Malta that several idle youths would have fallen by the wayside at school.

Their inability to achieve in class, perhaps because of undiagnosed learning difficulties, unsettling family situations or mental health problems, often made them feel like failures.

“If you feel like a failure at the outset, your outlook for the future is pretty bleak. So we need to understand that this is a very complex situation and there is much more to it than just what is at first apparent,” she said.

Many young people who fail to achieve academically suffer from low-esteem and self-confidence and fall into the ‘idleness’ trap. Photo: Shutterstock

Dr Farrugia Debono was reacting to the findings of a census, released on Wednesday, which found that around half of youths who were out of work and not in education thought they would spend the rest of their lives in this position.

The census, conducted for the first time among some 7,000 inactive youths on the island, found links between this attitude and low self-esteem. While most had dreams for the future, the majority did not believe they had what it took to achieve them.

This follows on another study – funded by the President’s Foundation for the Wellbeing of Society and featured in The Sunday Times of Malta – which established that those who abandoned school before they turned 16 were five times more likely to take antidepressants than those who remain in formal education longer.

During a press conference announcing the census findings, Education Minister Evarist Bartolo said the school system was too geared towards catering for the middle-class while letting down other students.

He said many of the students were ‘pushouts’ not dropouts, having been pushed away by a system that did not target them.

Dr Farrugia Debono said there was a need to challenge the commonly-held belief that idle youths were unemployed or not in education because of laziness.

If you feel like a failure at the outset, your outlook for the future is pretty bleak

Around half of the census respondents, however, said they were idle because they could not be bothered to do anything else.

Confronted with this, Dr Farrugia Debono insisted that behind the inability to stay in employment or tertiary education, lay a complex psychosocial situation tied to issues like poor self-esteem.

In fact, the census found that youths who were idle claimed to have self-esteem problems. The census also found that they lived less healthy lifestyles, and were more prone to depression, anxiety and tension.

Reacting to the findings, child psychologist Ralph Vella said he had often worked with youths who faced difficulties achieving in the school system. Many of these, he said, in turn exposed themselves to substance abuse, and unhealthy habits at a very young age.

“There is a belief that ‘trouble students’ are more interested in avoiding school work, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol or dabbling with drugs,” he said.

“Some might just be boisterous or misbehave. While this is sometimes true for separate reasons, it is also often the case that these youths turn to this lifestyle as a retreat from being unable to cope with the school system. Some just aren’t cut out for it,” he said.

Dr Vella said in such cases the solution was to target youths early on.

“The best chance these youths have is to try and break the cycle early on, to start correcting this behaviour and to try getting to the root of their problems. The longer you wait the harder it can get,” he said. Dr Farrugia Debono, too, believed interventions with these youths should start as soon as possible.

“It is crucial that even at a secondary school level, such adolescents are flagged up for an

intervention that might actually lessen their distress when they find themselves unable to cope with the demands of employment or tertiary education,” she said.

Dr Farrugia Debono was quick to add that troubled youths did not necessary present themselves as troublemakers disrupting class and getting into disciplinary meetings with headmasters. Instead, she said, they could also present themselves as quiet, withdrawn adolescents with few or no friends making the problem even harder to diagnose.

“It is these youths who most often are forgotten as they are much less visible,” she added.

Tuesday’s edition of Times Talk, on TVM at 10.05pm, will discuss the issue of wasted youth.