Risk Behaviours

If risk is a question, the body is where it gets asked, because the body cannot lie the way language can. A person can say they feel fine, can perform normality, can even convince themselves. But speed, hunger, cold, blood, the drop below the ledge — these produce sensations that no story can fake. Le Breton's recurring insight is that when words fail to hold a life together, people fall back on the flesh. The body becomes the last available surface on which to write that one exists.

He extends this well beyond the obvious cases. Anorexia, in his reading, is a risk behaviour: a young woman testing how far she can push the boundary between control and collapse, treating hunger as a discipline that proves mastery over a life that otherwise feels unauthored. Self-cutting works similarly — the wound is not primarily a bid for attention but a way of converting an unbearable, formless inner pain into something located, visible, and real. The cut hurts, and the hurt is a relief, because it can finally be seen.

Why now, and why the young especially? Le Breton's answer is historical. Older societies did not leave the passage into adulthood to chance. They staged it. There were rites of passage — ordeals, seclusions, ceremonies — in which a young person was symbolically taken apart and put back together as an adult, watched over by the community and marked as changed. The ordeal was real, sometimes frightening, but it was framed, held, and given meaning by everyone around it. You suffered, and the suffering meant something, and afterward you were someone new.

Modern Western societies, he argues, have quietly dismantled these thresholds without replacing them. Adolescence now stretches for years with no clear line to cross, no moment when the community declares that the child is gone and the adult has arrived. Legal ages are scattered and bureaucratic; they confer no felt transformation. The young are left in a long, ambiguous corridor, told they are almost adults but never told, in any way their bodies can register, that they have arrived.

Step back, and Le Breton's whole argument gathers around a single figure: the adolescent trying to be born a second time. The first birth was given, involuntary, biological. The second — becoming an adult, a self, someone who feels authorized to exist — has to be won, and traditionally it was won through an ordeal witnessed by others. Risk behaviour, in this light, is not the opposite of that ancient work. It is that work, orphaned of its rite.

This reframes what looks like self-destruction as a botched form of self-creation. The teenager courting danger is not, for the most part, rejecting life. They are demanding entry into it — asking for a threshold that no adult institution is willing to stage. Le Breton refuses both the panicked reading (they are sick, stop them) and the dismissive one (they are foolish, they'll grow out of it). Beneath the behaviour is a legitimate hunger: to be tested, to be marked, to be recognized as changed. The problem is not the hunger but the absence of any legitimate way to feed it.

Return to the teenager on the bridge. Once we stop reading the leap as a death wish, it becomes something stranger and sadder: an attempt to be confirmed. To ask the world a question — am I really here? — and to accept the pounding heart on the far side as a yes. Le Breton's achievement is to make that gesture legible without excusing its cost, to show that the wildest risk can be a defense of life mounted by someone who has lost the ordinary words for wanting it.