School refusal is a term originally used in the United Kingdom to describe refusal to attend school, due to emotional distress. School refusal differs from truancy in that children with school refusal feel anxiety or fear towards school, whereas truant children generally have no feelings of fear towards school, often feeling angry or bored with it instead. Children’s Hospital Boston provides a chart showing the difference between the school refusal and truancy.
The term was coined as a more general alternative to school phobia (UK/USA), Phobie de l'école/ Phobie scolaire (France), Schulangst (German), Fobia scuola (Italy), which was used to describe these youths in the past. School refusal is a broader term that recognizes that children have problems attending school for a variety of different reasons. However, these reasons might not be the expression of a true phobia, such as separation or social anxiety.
Hikikomori is a form of teenage depression and the degree of the phenomenon varies on an individual basis, in the most extreme cases, some people remain in isolation for years or even decades. Often hikikomori start out as school refusals, or futōkō (不登校) in Japanese (an older term is tōkōkyohi (登校拒否)). The Ministry of Health estimates that about 3,600,000 hikikomori live in Japan, about one third of whom are aged 30 and older.
Read more about School Refusal: Frequency, Symptoms, Diagnosis, Causative Factors, Helpful Resources
Famous quotes containing the words school and/or refusal:
“I never went near the Wellesley College chapel in my four years there, but I am still amazed at the amount of Christian charity that school stuck us all with, a kind of glazed politeness in the face of boredom and stupidity. Tolerance, in the worst sense of the word.... How marvelous it would have been to go to a women’s college that encouraged impoliteness, that rewarded aggression, that encouraged argument.”
—Nora Ephron (b. 1941)
“Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra. In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1951)