Guseltseva M.S. Book review. Ole Jacob Madsen. Deconstructing Scandinavia's “Achievement Generation”. A Youth Mental Health Crisis? London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021

The book by the Norwegian social psychologist Ole Madsen is devoted to the socialization of the younger generations in the conditions of the modern information society. O. Madsen begins his research with a philosophical analysis of the socio-cultural situation of our time, revealing hidden conflicts and contradictions, risks and new development opportunities in it, relying on the way of thinking through antinomies, demonstrating the mutual complementarity of polar positions, where, on the one hand, modern youth have never before did not have such favorable conditions for self-realization, and on the other hand, children and adolescents are exhausted by the challenges of the information society, inflated social expectations, and the requirements for building an identity. O. Madsen proves that the concept of variability and stability in human existence needs a methodological balance. In order to compensate for the shortcomings of philosophical reflections devoted to the criticism of modernity, O. Madsen turns to the analysis of individual cases of the vulnerability of a person's existence in the world, drawing on materials from high-quality interviews of young people who survived depression from Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The uniqueness of the book and the research style of O. Madsen lies in the fact that he combined the philosophical criticism of modernity with qualitative studies of the socialization of Scandinavian youth; socio-cultural analysis of the current situation and a unique phenomenology of the psychological development of individual young people. According to O. Madsen, modernity is experienced today by a person as something fundamentally different from traditional forms of existence, which means that it is not relevant to use those criteria and focus on those models that were developed by other eras. One of the research questions addressed throughout the book was the study of how widely discussed today social factors, such as increased complexity, diversity, detraditionalization, individualization and self-realization, influence the interpretation of subjects' own psychological ill health.

Key words: methodology, socialization in the modern information society, health psychology, therapeutic culture, Scandinavian youth

For citation: Guseltseva, M.S. (2023). Ole Jacob Madsen. Deconstructing Scandinavia's “Achievement Generation”. A Youth Mental Health Crisis? London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. New Psychological Research, No. 2, 63–81. DOI: 10.51217/npsyresearch_2023_03_02_04