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August 28, 2024 - 10:00am
New statistics have revealed the extent of the youth mental health crisis in England, and the strain it is putting on the NHS. According to figures reported by the Guardian, more than 500 children a day are being referred to mental health services for anxiety, over double the rate before the Covid-19 pandemic began. This means that a child is being referred literally every three minutes, with almost 4000 being referred a week.
How did we get here? Part of the problem has been our tendency to pathologise normal childhood and teenage experiences: parents and young people have internalised a more medicalised narrative of wellbeing, in which everyday experiences are rebranded in therapeutic language, and the expected struggles and challenges of adolescence are labelled as mental health issues. Yet greater self-diagnosis or self-reporting does not explain why record numbers of young people are self-harming, committing suicide, or being treated for eating disorders.
Part of the problem may be environmental: intensifying academic pressures, long-term effects of lockdowns, rising poverty levels, the cost-of-living crisis, climate anxieties. Tracking Oxford University Press’s Children’s Word of the Year is an eerie indicator of how children’s worlds and priorities have changed. In 2014, children voted for the word minion; then it became hashtag in 2015, refugee in 2016, Trump in 2017, plastic in 2018, Brexit in 2019, coronavirus in 2020, and anxiety in 2021. Last year it was climate change. The UK’s last decade of permacrisis has certainly not helped, but this cannot explain the full story: the rise in anxiety and depression in young people is found across the Western world.
A much more convincing argument, as advocated by social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt, is that we have overprotected young people in the real world while failing to protect them in the virtual one, and this has fundamentally rewired children’s brains. The loss of “play-based” childhood has been crucial to this: our overemphasis on the “dangers” of the real world and our society-wide obsession with safetyism means that, in many ways, children are more supervised than ever, and so their brains stay in “defend” rather than “discovery” mode.
They therefore have fewer opportunities to develop resilience, self-reliance and other skills like risk-evaluation, because they are given insulation rather than autonomy. Last week presenter Kirstie Allsopp had to publicly defend her decision to let her 15-year-old son go travelling across Europe after being reported to a social worker, exemplifying our cautiousness when it comes to children’s experiences in the real world.
At the same time, however, we give young people far too much freedom in the virtual world, despite the fact that they are far more likely to come across dangers, criminals and perverts online than they are offline. Girls get sucked into the self-esteem crushing vortex of social media, while boys are more likely to become hooked on gaming and porn. Both miss out on character-building experiences because, as the sociologist Sherry Turkle puts it, they are “forever elsewhere”.
Across the Anglosphere, we therefore have a paradox of both increasingly paranoid and increasingly laissez-faire parenting, and when we consider how dramatically childhoods have changed in a relatively short space of time, perhaps the statistics are no longer so staggering. Are we really surprised that so many children are anxious, when we live in a society where a third of children do not have access to any nearby playgrounds, and yet the average two-year-old already has access to an iPad?
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SubscribeThanks for this. Spot on analyses IMO. While the causes are multi dimensional like you say, “over protecting in the physical realm and under protecting in the virtual” is likely at the heart of the matter. After the recent outcry over Kirstie Allsopp, even the Guardian has published an article partly defending her decision to let her boy going on a european tour, while warning about neglect of the virtual.
Very well-stated and probably holds true for the States as well.
The suicide level, at least, doesn’t seem to hold true for U.S. as well. See my link below.
Also, it may not be wise to take a single year’s stat — assuming it’s been analyzed properly — as indicative of a trend in suicide in the group studied, let alone as solid support for a broader claim about youth mental health. There’s too much at stake, potentially, to be less than exacting about statistics.
My hesitation to draw conclusions from the one-year suicide stat doesn’t mean that I deny there’s a youth mental health crisis in England. Not at all. I just don’t have enough context to have certainty that the stat means what it seems to mean. I’ve learned to tread lightly around statistics!
To summarise, the world we’ve permitted to be created over the last 25 years or so is pretty horrible.
Presumably if Tarquin and Tabitha are made anxious by climate change, they will say, “No, we mustn’t fly” when Mummy and Daddy offer them a tip to Disney World in Florida.
I imagine the Tarquins and Tabithas of the world are nit the ones going to Disney World.
Standards are slipping, everywhere!
Last year’s Oxford University Press’s Children’s Word of the Year is, in fact, two words.
Brilliant!
It’s all left hemisphere and little or no right hemisphere activity.
I’m referring not to the the debunked yet still prevalent split-brain theory developed in the 1960s by Roger Sperry et al, but rather to Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s findings about how the brain’s hemispheres differ in the way they attend to the world, and how each hemisphere contributes in its own way to perception, thought and behaviour.
There are around 250 YouTube videos featuring Iain McGilchrist and his work. The one I recommend in this case is We are living in a deluded world, in which McGilchrist talks with Freddie Sayers, editor-in-chief & CEO of UnHerd.
Morning Jack! I have fond memories of Iain. 40-something years ago when just down from Oxford, he taught me A level Eng. Lit., and used to drive two or three of us discreetly out to countryside pubs for tutorials over a pint.
See you maybe in the Bellend tomorrow evening.
As much as anything, children are missing out on childhood. Some of it is an over-emphasis on safetyism, which is programmed to see mortal threats where none exist and to exaggerate the risks that do. Add to that the online menace and what a mess that’s been created.
It also does not stop with children. Some adults cannot cross a parking lot without their faces buried in a screen. Couples at dinner are often more interested in the virtual activity playing out on their smartphones than the real person sitting across them. There is even a woefully named trend called ‘rawdogging’ for people who somehow manage to handle an airline flight without digital interaction.
Anxious parents make anxious children, of course the children are anxious, they watch the adults around them freak out about everything around them and hear them say how anxious they are continously. Just maybe the modern world has become too complicated for the homo sapien brain to cope, too much information and stimulus for the neurons.
When it comes to suicide, the data seems to be different in the U.S., 2020 – 2023. The link the author provides refers to stats from the UK’s Office for National Statistics, “analysed by Young Minds,” which analysis concludes that “suicide rates among young people aged 15-19 in England rose by 35 per cent from 2020 to 2021.”
I’m not sure how much value can be gained from a single year’s statistic. Maybe lots, maybe not much. I think we need further context to understand the statistic and to draw the most accurate conclusions we can from it.
Thread by Tyler Black, MD, a respected Canadian suicidologist, emergency psychiatrist, pharmacologist:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1820192776094458215.html
Bring back the traditional family and traditional teaching: problem solved for the great majority of cases.
Also, change the emphasis in education to sport, music and manual crafts.
Are public-awareness campaigns helping to create anxious parents and teachers? Are children conflating messages about recognising anxiety and messages about their eternal victimhood? Anxiety as a clinical condition is NOT the same as worrying about exams, the colour of your hair, the shape of your jeans or whether you can get away with not doing your homework. Worry is an essential part of our survival kit; anxiety is debilitating.
Sounds about right
Too much digital freedom & not enough of the real thing
Plus let’s remember that child therapists are not only noble healers, but fallible beings, some of whom might be financially & professionally invested in bigging things up
This article says it perfectly. I have nothing to add.