Beyond Anxiety: School Refusal as a Disrupted Individuation Process in Post-COVID Adolescents

Background The post-COVID surge in school refusal has prompted a clinical response overwhelmingly focused on anxiety and its treatments. While this orientation is scientifically grounded, it remains partial: it fails to account for a dimension that successive lockdowns massively disrupted without the recent literature fully integrating it, namely the separation-individuation process (SIP) specific to adolescence. Aims This article proposes a complementary and integrative reading of post-COVID school refusal, organized around three axes. Approach First, lockdowns interrupted the environmental conditions necessary for the SIP to unfold, producing a developmental regression whose extent was revealed upon the return to school. Second, the hyperdigitalization that followed the lockdowns offered adolescents a substitution space enabling pseudo-separation without genuine individuation, durably impeding the process. Third, internal working models of attachment constitute the vulnerability substrate within which these impediments take hold. Findings A clinical vignette illustrates these articulations through a composite case of an adolescent whose partial school refusal is reread as an attempt to regulate a disrupted SIP rather than as an anxiety symptom to be reduced. Conclusions The article argues for a non-pathologizing reading of school refusal and opens research perspectives on the relationship between autonomy, attachment, and digital practices in adolescence.