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Associate Professor, Department of Pedagogy, Psychology and Physical Education, Samarkand State Institute of Foreign Languages, Samarkand, Uzbekistan
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National University of Uzbekistan named after Mirzo Ulugbek, Tashkent, Uzbekistan
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Vice-Rector for Youth, Spiritual and Educational Affairs, Bukhara State Pedagogical Institute Bukhara, Bukhara, Uzbekistan
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Associate Professor, Department of Social Sciences, Pedagogy and Psychology, Tashkent State Medical University, Tashkent, Uzbekistan
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National Pedagogical University of Uzbekistan named after Nizami of Uzbekistan, Tashkent, Uzbekistan
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Senior Lecturer, Tashkent University of Information Technologies named after Muhammad al-Khwarizmi, Tashkent, Uzbekistan
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Department of English Language Applied Disciplines, Faculty of First English, Uzbekistan State World Languages University, Tashkent, Uzbekistan
Associate Professor, Jizzakh State Pedagogical University, Jizzakh, Uzbekistan
The issue of youth substance abuse persists as one of public health concern, and the current strategies targeting adolescents through messages related to danger and deficit frames have proven inconsistent in terms of effectiveness in the long term. This paper explores the theory of salutogenesis, which derives its origins from the model of health by Aaron Antonovsky, as another paradigm for youth anti-drug prevention, where the focus will be on the psychological well-being and the individual risks for young people. In contrast to the prevailing deficit-oriented approaches, the salutogenic model focuses on the resources for general resistance and the sense of coherence consisting of comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness, which determine the ways adolescents cope with difficulties, including the use of substances. This study provides a narrative review of theoretical and empirical literature published between 2010 and 2025 to examine youth substance use risks, protective resources associated with a high sense of coherence, and the integration of salutogenesis into school-, family-, and digital-based prevention programs. The following conceptual architecture of associations among risk exposure, generalized resistance resources, sense of coherence, psychological health, and behavior outcomes is put forward in an effort to integrate these variables under one explanation model, through process flow and comparative illustration examples. It is clear from the results of this research that psychological health acts as a proximal mediator between risk exposure and substance use susceptibility, and that efforts aimed at enhancing manageability, comprehensibility, and meaningfulness of people’s life situations have a positive correlation with the reduction in substance involvement. Implications of the current study are discussed in relation to the field of prevention studies.
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