A PLAY-based approach for adolescent patients: the importance of panksepp’s primary emotional system of PLAY in engagement with adolescent psychiatric patients

Professionals working with adolescents invest enormous resources and energies to find a tailored approach to improve patients’ compliance and promote their access to care. As a result, Panksepp’s Primary Emotive Systems (PES) can be useful instruments to develop tailored treatment plans specific for this age. We aimed to find a PES specific for adolescence, correlated to psychopathological features, in order to guide mental health professionals in approaching and treating adolescent psychiatric patients. This is a cross-sectional study. We recruited 156 patients seeking help during their first evaluation and divided the sample into two different age groups: 114 were 14-19 years old (ADO) and 42 were 20-65 years old (ADULT). They performed a psychopathological evaluation. We found strong associations between PLAY PES and psychopathological features in the ADO group (not in the ADULT group). Then we sub-divided the ADO and the ADULT group in HIGH-PLAY(HP) and LOW-PLAY(LP) and performed a One-Way ANOVA. In the ADO group, we found significant differences between HP and LP group psychopathological features, but the same was not found in the ADULT group. PLAY is an emotive system that is highly correlated with psychopathological features in our sample of adolescents seeking help. This correlation was not found in ADULT patients. For these results, we suggested PLAY can be a useful instrument to treat help-seeking adolescents with mental health issues.