When school engagement rhymes with roots breach. Adolescents and school avoidance in transcultural situations

Frontiers in Psychiatry - Hypothesis and Theory | Research Topic: School Avoidance and Anxiety Disorders in Childhood.

Anxious school avoidance (ASA) affects 1 to 5% of school-aged children and adolescents and carries well-documented consequences including school dropout, social isolation, and comorbid anxiety and depressive disorders. While functional, cognitive- behavioral, and psychodynamic models have significantly advanced the understanding of ASA, one dimension remains strikingly underexplored: its transcultural dimension. With over 281 million international migrants worldwide - including 35.5 million children under 18 - families from migration backgrounds represent a growing proportion of those consulting child and adolescent mental health services. Existing frameworks only partially account for the specific psychic configurations that emerge when migratory trajectories, intergenerational transmission, and identity construction intersect. Hypothesis: This article proposes that, in certain transcultural configurations, school engagement may be experienced - at an unconscious level - as a symbolic threat of rupture with familial, cultural, historical, and migratory roots. We conceptualize this process as a roots breach. Rather than proposing a new diagnostic category, this heuristic clinical construct - grounded in complementarist epistemology - operates across four registers: loyalty, identity, filiation, and debt, designating the unconscious pathways through which school investment becomes entangled with dynamics of belonging and intergenerational transmission.

The hypothesis is developed through eight theoretical sections articulating the complementarist epistemology of transcultural clinical practice (Devereux, Moro), the psychopathology of migration and cultural bereavement, the school institution as a site of identity tension in migratory trajectories, and the psychoanalytic dimensions of learning as subjective transformation (Bion, Meltzer & Harris). The concept of métissage and Bhabha's third space are mobilized to articulate the creative and conflictual dimensions of plural belonging.

Three anonymized clinical vignettes illustrate the diversity of presentations in which the roots breach manifests and demonstrate the role of transcultural psychotherapy in creating a space where this configuration can be named and worked through.

The roots breach hypothesis opens new research directions for ASA in transcultural contexts and carries significant implications for clinical training, school-care collaboration, and culturally responsive mental health services for adolescents.