Person-centered health and the resilient adolescent

Introduction

 The year 2024 was the anniversary of the birth of the World Federation and Society of Adolescentology, (WFSA).WFSA was founded in Milan at the end the International Family Year in 1994. The conference was organized under the UN patronage, and  promoted by the Italian Society of Adolescentology and Medicine of Adolescence (SIAd), the first scientific society of Adolescentology, born in 1987, in Italy, in the Adolescence Medicine and Psychology Institute (IMEPA) of the Italian Centre of Medical Psychology,(CISPM) which introduced  Adolescentology, and its teaching as a new multidisciplinary unitary epistemology of adolescence. Adolescentology is inspired by a Person-centered unitary paradigm of study of adolescence, still today fragmented in the disciplines that study it.

Adolescentology was therefore an epistemological revolution that allowed to see the adolescent as a person, subject of his existence and to interpret its nature in the light of Kairology,  as a question of meaning of life, truth, love and beauty that receives and creates possibilities to give a true answer to the mystery of existence. Adolescentology values the resources of the adolescent, before problems, at educational and clinical level, and interprets in a unitary way adolescence as an adaptive stress caused by the perception of a psychological and physical real identity question , naturally finalized to the development of the dignity to be a real person. (Brera 1993-2000). Person-centered clinics and investigation on adolescence and Medical counselling, (1991) was the cradle of Person-centered Medicine, based on the interactionist and teleonomic change of medical science and Medicine that has overcome the still current but obsolete and implicit determinist-mechanistic epistemology of medical science reduced to linear causality, valid only in the emergency room, when there is a biological emergency.

    Since 1987 by IMEPA-CISPM and then 1995 the Department of Adolescentology and Adolescence Medicine of the Ambrosiana University, still unique in the world,  provide post-graduate courses in Clinical Adolescentology and Medical counselling , Health Education with  adolescents, and have promoted and organized numerous international Congresses, on the matter and Person-Centered Medicine, of which the next scheduled  wants to be decisive for the . definitive change in the concept of health and deepen the protective factors that make adolescents resilient to physical, psychological and environmental adversities.

The purpose of this Congress is to advance the concept of having health centered on the person, definable today  as “The choice of true possibilities to be the best human person” (Brera 2011-2024) and to bring together researchers who study resilience in adolescents and young people, in the light of the ethical values ​​of Universal Declaration of the Youth Rights and Duties and the World Health Charter. This Congress, the first on this theme, is associated with the 1st Edition of Science Olympics Italy 2025, which will be a stimulus to young researchers who can aspire to the podium of Olympic Science Champions – 2025.

Claudio Violato, Giuseppe R.Brera, Richard Fiordo (Co-chairs)

Honorary fellows of WFSA

Official languages: English-Italian

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INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE OLYMPICS -ITALY 2025

Introduction to the Birth of Science Olympics Italy – 2025

The symbol of the Olympics is five circles of different colors, united. It is not difficult to recognize three symbols: the circle, the symbol of perfection, the color, the symbol of the diversity of the skin color of the different human races, the point of union between the circles, the symbol of a space-time that unites the different peoples, the different cultures, the different nations, the different men.

The classical Olympics measure the victory of muscular strength, of the ability of the discipline of training. Today it is no longer enough, because never like today has man lost, on a global level his destiny, his path, his being united by the light of intelligence and reason. Three hundred million people in the world suffer from hunger, millions of children die every year from famine, fratricidal wars, such as the Ukrainian-Russian war, wipe out a generation of young people, dark minds and criminals massacre young people, the elderly, women and children, as in Gaza and it happened in the neighboring territories.

“Light of intelligence”: it is impossible not to remember the master of masters of Western culture. St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the two gems of the history of thought together with St. Augustine, the father of anthropology in his “Being, knowing, loving ” as the divine identity of man, father of introspection and psychoanalysis, in his “Redi in te ipsum in interiore homine habitat veritas”,  two glories of Milan and Rome, two glories of the country, Italy, through which a large part of the history of the world and of civilization and of the scientific-technological discoveries that have revolutionized the world has passed.

In his Summa Theologica, St. Thomas writes that “Knowing comes before desiring” and that “Truth comes before good” and that it is the will of God that illuminates man’s intelligence and that for this reason intelligence is “Lumen gloriae ”.

The exercise of muscles, competing in sports, as a result of a rigor in the chosen sports discipline is a good thing and promotes the health of men, but it says little with the desire for truth, for the eternal that does not end in the mind and heart of man, because it allows him the direct experience of the mystery of the light of God in the intelligence of man, created by him, the experience of his will that orders everything for the good of humanity and of the individual man, even evil, in the light that illuminates every darkness inside and outside man and makes him enter into the “Lumen gloriae ”.

Science, as the birth of thought that describes reality, that is, the truth about the laws of nature, always new, always unknown and relative to the time of humanity, is together with philosophy and theology, the science of God – which does not arise from the knowledge of nature, like philosophy – it is the will of man to enter with the knowledge of the truth, entering into the “Lumen gloriae “, in the revelation of God, to the intelligence of man, in making himself known in the truth of His son who entered the world and history . In fact, we are by universal recognition in 2025, which means that 2025 years ago an event happened that changed time: to see or not to see, like in a game of “Poker” with existence, in which the one who has the most aces in his hands wins, which mysteriously fell into his hand, without prediction.

The same goes for the idea of a theory that revolutionizes the interpretation of natural laws: just think of the great paradigm shifts in physics, such as the theory of general relativity, or in medicine, with the unpredictable birth of person-centered medicine and the concept of health derived from it, or the very idea of creating a global competition between young researchers and consequently the universities and cultures in which they were born.

What is then the deepest meaning of this idea, which does not want to take anything away from the exercises of the muscles and from sport, but which wants to reward the youngest who have begun to sacrifice their lives, their time, their affections, motivated by the desire to know that light which attracts them and which alone makes us noble and worthy of our dignity, free in our freedom and which illuminates the night of mystery, the desire for truth and in it for eternity and its mysterious correspondence with man and which is mysteriously given by God to the intelligence of those who are humble in mind and heart, to make themselves known in the laws of the nature of man and of the nature of the universe, apparently inanimate, in the splendor of the “Lumen Gloriae “.

I am happy that this first edition of the Science Olympics is taking place in Assisi, a recognized center of universal peace, where humility is combined with the possibility of love and universal brotherhood, of peace between peoples, cultures and nations, today still in the night of intelligence and reason with murderous wars. Humility, love, however, without the “Lumen gloriae ”, can do nothing.

It is only “The lumen gloriae ” that unites, as each of us can experience in the sight of the light, when the sun rises, whose light unites everything that is perceptible, as if everything were reborn in the light, and which Pope Ratzinger allowed us to reflect on in the beautiful commentary on the passage from the Gospel of John, the “Healing of the man born blind”.

A true scientist is therefore a “Son of light”, son of the “Lumen Gloriae ” and it is this desire to be reborn together in the truth, which is the symbol and soul of the Science Olympics.

The “Lumen gloriae ” creates a new space-time for every scientist, light of truth, necessity for the good of humanity, in contrast to a dark historical moment in which the universal culture of “smartphones”, the lack of sublimation of the primordial instincts of human nature, including the death instinct, the cause of war, in which opinion, and media information, even false, triumphs over the search for truth.

The point of union between the circles, the space-time that unites races, peoples, nations, cultures, men and women is the space-time of the light of truth: “The lumen gloriae ”.

The world champions of scientific intelligence will therefore also be the world champions “Of the Lumen Gloriae ”, ultimately “Champions of God”, witnesses of the light, His will for the good of man, which has never been extinguished in the history of humanity. The truth that they have discovered and that they will discover will serve the good of humanity and of every man.

Courage! Let us create a new world together in the light of truth, humility, brotherhood, peace! Let us create the time of “Lumen Gloriae ”.

Giuseppe R.Brera