Beyond infatuation and love: Review of adolescent mental health manuals in India

Abstract

Romantic relationship is one among the defining feature and developmental task of adolescence, often considered to have significant influence on the course of other developmental tasks, overall health and wellbeing. Thus the present paper made an attempt to review different mental health promotion manuals developed for adolescence in India with the aim to understand whether those manuals address the emerging issues of adolescence in romantic relationship. Seven manuals were selected for this purpose and reviewed based on its content, methodology, target population and how issues pertaining to romantic relationship has been addressed. It was observed that all the manuals covered different aspects related to developmental needs and concerns of adolescents in general; especially the developmental significance of romantic relationship with its socio-cultural background has received little attention. Therefore this article implied for developing comprehensive manuals on emerging issues of adolescents in romantic relationship as a great need of the time.

Keywords

• adolescents
• india
• manuals
• narrative review
• romantic relationship