There's a mental health crisis among our young people. And it has nothing to do with mobile phones or video games*.
* Though it probably does.
Not only is there a worsening crisis in the mental health of our fresh faced recent arrivals but to make matters worse, accessing support services is getting harder. Literally no one could predict this outcome from cutting taxes and public spending.
So, there have been numerous articles recently decrying the appalling lack of provision of mental health care, specifically for young people, and highlighting the fact that either there are far more young people experiencing mental illness or that health services have magically got better at spotting it and thus more are being diagnosed. More are certainly taking medication. Two recent BBC pieces found anti-depressant prescriptions for under 12 year olds has risen by 27% over the last three years (to be fair it's a small number so any increase might look more severe) and a general increase in the number of antidepressants prescribed to children.
What's going on? Some frontline mental health service providers are calling it a silent catastrophe, teachers are calling it an epidemic and the British government are calling it the EU's fault, once we're free of their shackles our wellbeing will return.
"Almost four in five (78%) teachers have seen a pupil struggle with a mental health problem in the past year, with one in seven (14%) cases involving suicidal thoughts or behaviour."
It's interesting to correlate that with surveys of teaching staff:
"An overwhelming number of teachers in the UK have suffered either physically or mentally because of their jobs, a study has suggested.
The research, commissioned by the charity Education Support Partnership, indicated 75% of teaching staff in schools and colleges experienced symptoms stemming from their work.
An earlier survey indicated 62% of the working population was affected.
Depression, anxiety and panic attacks were among the conditions cited." BBC
So about the same percent of teachers and students are depressed. God, schools are miserable, hopeless places. Close them all down, I say. Let the kids run free. And the teachers too. And then kids and teachers can co-exist in mutual harmony like lions and gazelles...blah blah.
On the frontline of health services:
"The report...exposes a “serious and worsening crisis” for the health service through a survey of those working in child and adolescent mental health services (Camhs), says trusts are being hollowed out and specialist services are disappearing owing to underfunding and the transformation and redesign of services in recent years."
Who would have thought that tax cuts and...oh yeah...And
"Almost 400,000 children and young people a year in England are being treated for mental health problems, the highest number ever, NHS figures show.
There were a total of 389,727 “active referrals” for people aged 18 or younger in April, a third higher than the same month two years ago, according to the latest statistics published by NHS Digital.
The number seeking help for conditions such as anxiety, depression and eating disorders is rising sharply." The Guardian
That does sound like a lot. I mean I have no idea how many people in the UK are under 18, actually the 2011 census shows that there's about 9 million 8-19 year olds, so it's relatively low (about 9%). Of course, we have a halcyon idea of what childhood should be like so there's an assumption that these are the happy times before life takes you by the hand and leads you down misery land.
However, there's one thing that can always put misery in perspective, the words "In the US it's even worse." It is, of course. America, land of the free, home of the mentally ill. That's not me being Americallergic (it's a classification in the DSM 5) it's just the way it is. The freer the country the more insane the people. Or rather, there is a correlation between the most consumer capitalist least social democratic countries and madness. Why could this be?
What is going on?
In a world where the government are proposing beginning academic testing from aged 4 and children are routinely tested aged 7, 11, 16, 18, 21 and beyond and inbetween, where media is ubiquitous through internet, TV, smartphones, tablets and games machines, where the young are exposed constantly to images of perfection (alongside graphic porn), where conformity is rewarded through brand loyalty, where consumption defines us, and with climate change there quite literally is no future, what could be causing this wave of anxiety and depression among the young?
It's a mystery.
Is it simply that young people don't like being examined, sexualized, sold, objectified and feeling hopeless? Or is it something deeper? Something to do with brain inflammation or chemical imbalance or genetic disposition.
It would be odd if we didn't accept that the high rates of depression and anxiety among the teaching profession (I was a scarred combat veteran myself) is down to the actual profession rather than suggesting all those teachers had a brain inflammation or were genetically disposed to going mad in the face of a hostile, stressful and thankless environment. So why would we not think that children facing a horribly uncertain future in a media saturated present, consistently under pressure to perform, would not experience depression because of these very things?
But that's not really the priority. Of the government. The health service. Schools. Or indeed all the articles discussing this silent epidemic catastrophe tsunami. It's about accessing services and preventative measures:
"When it comes to young people in extreme distress or at risk of suicide, effective crisis services and access to support are utterly essential. But so too is preventing youngsters from reaching a crisis in the first place," writes Mary O'Hara in The Guardian.
What are these services?
"Psychotherapists warned of “a serious and worsening crisis” following a survey of staff in child and adolescent mental health services (Camhs)."
Now, I confess that when I worked in psychotherapy and in teaching I never heard anyone offer a good word about camhs unfortunately, so I am a little biased. But camhs have an in depth study in the area called, whisper it, Silent Catastrophe. And they offer an in depth description of what good services might look like (page 6). Having read it I'm just as clueless. It seems to be management speak about how the services should be run rather than what they should be. Therapy? Who knows?
The BBC pieces above come up with such therapeutic gems as
"Dr Bernadka Dubicka, who chairs the child and adolescent faculty at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: "Currently only one in four children and young people are treated for their mental health problems.
"The fact that prescriptions for antidepressants are rising could reflect a slow but steady move towards treating everyone who is unwell."
Unwell. Oh my. I have a slight depressive eating disordered head cold, here are some pills that will make it all go away or make you so sedated you won't care.
A more reasoned response is offered by
Marc Bush, chief policy advisor at Young Minds: "...front-line professionals are turning to prescription pads, because they're thinking, 'I'm seeing someone in front of me in crisis with a level of distress I don't want to leave them with - how do I offer them some kind of alleviation from that?'"
All the pieces I've read have suggested "the need for preventative, early intervention and specialist services." I'm always a bit alarmed when the words preventative and early intervention are used. How would you prevent or intervene early in children's mental health?
"In the US, concerns about young people’s mental health have come to the fore lately, too, including for common problems like anxiety, depression and suicide. Suicide is the second biggest cause of death for 10- to 24-year-olds in the US."
Of course, the first biggest cause is school shootings. Ironically carried out by mentally ill young people. If you were completely heartless you would just arm all American 10 year olds and watch them battle out their inner demons in a Battle Royale infotainment style reality show. If you were heartless that is.
"Schools face huge challenges in dealing with mental health issues in their students, and teachers are on the front line. They witness first-hand the devastating impact of pressures such as exam anxiety, bullying, and family problems."
So schools and families are the problem? Isn't this what RD Laing was saying back in the 1960s?
Of course, if you obsessively test children (or not obsessively at all actually, I completed a first Eng Lit degree with no exams and it was a joy) then, well, shock horror, this causes massive stress. Not only from the exams themselves but it reinforces wider social needs, the need to conform and to belong and the ridiculous idea of succeeding, when, of course, your family and postcode has already defined your level of 'success' (the testing process is, of course, to divide thestrong bright from the weak less academically bright).
Yet all the media pieces I cite here do not talk about a culture change but rather investing in services (never explicitly stating what these services are and how they work or, most importantly, how effective they are). That my friends is the very definition of a sticky plaster. It is the equivalent of facing up to the current climate breakdown with wildfires across the globe by banning drinking straws. It seems like you're doing something but you're actually completely ignoring the cause or facing up to the need for changing behaviours.
Children not only face a far more complex education system than the one I grew up in in the 1970s (yes, I'm old) but also face uncertainty in the work place where an imposed flexible workforce is the preferred economic model. Preferred by corporations, of course, and thus by governments. They face the "no future," that Johnny Rotten once screamed, of climate collapse. This is perhaps the first generation with no discernible future projection. The baby boomers of the 50s and 60s had a dream that technology would free us and we would live a life of ease. The technology we have far supersedes anything they could have dreamed of yet we work longer hours, children study longer in order to scavenge for employment. There is no pleasure in learning and not even an attempt to pretend there is. No one denies school is an apprenticeship for work now. The young can't dream of the day when they can put their tools aside and live on a comfortable pension. We're told that an ageing population means this generation are going to have fend for themselves and work until they drop.
Calls to helplines by the most vulnerable infants have skyrocketed
Health professionals suggest feeding these infants spoonfuls of tricyclic antidepressants
Or if available, talk therapy
The young are exposed to sexualized images continually and at far younger ages. With the technology of smartphones and the internet the average 12 year old sees things that I just can't seem to access no matter how hard I search. Is that necessarily a bad thing? It is with the kind of sexualized imagery widely available on the net (clue, it's deeply misogynistic). More importantly, it asks questions of them. Of their own sexuality.
"Help must include a concerted focus on groups that face additional inequalities, such as LGBTQ youth who are much more likely to experience common mental health problems. Research shows that almost twice as many young LGBTQ people in the UK (44%) have considered suicide compared with heterosexual non-trans young people (26%)," writes O'Hara.
I thought we were all now completely informed and understanding about boys being poofs and acting like girls. It seems not.
We live in the age of choice in perhaps the most conformist society since the 1950s. Children are not only taught to conform through the testing school system but actively engage in conforming through being saturated by media. Visual media. Everything is about looking and being seen.
Here's another BBC piece:
"When she was 15, Naomi Lea was suffering up to 10 panic attacks a day and self-harming.
Struggling with the pressure of social media and anxious about exams, she felt isolated and scared...
Young people are spending a lot of their time online and there's the pressures of seeing other people going out and feeling lonely about that and then also that pressure to portray yourself a certain way online, which is something I really struggled with," she said.
"I was seeing that everyone else was portraying these perfect lives and I didn't feel like I had that so you automatically make that comparison which then makes you feel worse.
"There's such an emphasis on your appearance and that links in with social media. People take thousands of selfies but just post one that they like online and there's just this pressure to portray yourself as this perfect person.""
We're preoccupied with appearance, as befits a society that is obsessed with watching. More disturbingly, we watch ourselves. Children are brought up in a smartphone social media culture where behaviour is regulated by peers and advertizing. The average 6 year old now sees more adverts in the time it took me to write that than the average adult saw in a whole lifetime in 1508.
Advertizing is by definition about conformity. An advertizing saturated society is helplessly conformist. And in a conformist society choice is limited, again by definition. Children now have less agency than my own generation. That's a damning backwards step. Agency is linked to depression (working class people are far more likely to be diagnosed). I don't need actual evidence for this, of course...oh god, alright, just look at cultures by decade and compare mainstream to subcultures. The 1950s youth rebellion was merely a reflection of the ideal consumerist society. With slicker hair. But something radically altered in the 1960s and a true counter culture formed, for good or ill. Where is the counter culture for young people now? How does the average 18 year old tune in and drop out? Where is their freedom to choose?
If I were a child now I would be even more depressed than I was when I was a child (and by all accounts I was a truly depressed child). On a personal level, families appear less stable. That could be beneficial, of course, if Laing was right and the family is the site of the beginning of psychosis. But then, how do children escape families now? Through media. Which conforms, watches, makes us watch ourselves, etc.. It just replaces the family as site of the beginning of psychosis.
If this were all correct, that it's the way our society is structured that causes our mental illness, then the obvious answer to the children madness silent epidemic thing is to change how society is structured. There's compelling evidence that grown up adult people are increasingly bewildered by the complexity of our society (see Paul Arbair's take on Brexit) and they've seen it happen so for children now, knowing nothing else, it must be a bewildering hopeless maze.
But just as all the recent coverage of astonishing heatwaves across the world was belatedly linked to climate change no one in the media coverage actually points out what we should do about it. Because it's both obvious and untenable. Change our society? It's not going to happen.
It's better to medicalize 'the fault.' And treat it as if it were a biological phenomena.
However, the report by the Association of Child Psychotherapists cited in The Guardian does throw a spanner in the works of the biomedical model of intervention.
"...The service was redesigned and now does not meet the needs of a large section of the population who have significant mental health needs. There is no time for proper assessments and treatment...
Treatment is focused on symptoms rather than the whole child or young person in context, it continues. Children and young people are left to “get worse before being seen” and there is an “increasing mismatch between need and treatment offered”. [my italics]"
And
"England's Children's Commissioner Anne Longfield says there is currently a children's mental health epidemic.
"The fact of the matter is that poor mental health has become part and parcel of childhood for many many children and it affects every aspects of their lives as they grow up, these formative years.
"I think we are seeing a real shift here in children's mental health.
"It affects their achievements in school, their friendships, their self-confidence, their self-belief and ultimately their future. And I think it's happened fast and it's happened at scale."" BBC
Blimey.
But once again, after suggesting there's a major sea change here: "almost 20% of girls at 14 now have a diagnosed mental health condition. A quarter of teenage girls are diagnosed with depression. This isn't something which is a small blip here and there. This is something which so many parents around the country know because it's happening to their children or children in the country."
This is an epidemic of staggering proportions, it's happening now, unlike any other time, so what do we do about it?
""We know that children are bombarded with these unattainable lifestyles that they see from celebrities and online alike and they just can't compete. It's as if there's been a narrowing down of what success looks like.
"You have to look good, you have to be successful, it has to come quick. And then of course we've got the digital world which has come over the last ten years, not I believe, causing these things, but fuelling these things.
"So everything is fast, there's no downtime. Appearances are all. Academic achievement is important of course, but has become a major major focus in schools and that makes it very difficult for children to find their way through.
I'm not seeking to medicalise childhood here at all, but I think children are experiencing a much more complicated existence than many of us adults did..."
What does Anne Longfield suggest we do? Change the education system? Make them throw away their phones and rally in the streets? Resist the consumer culture, throw away our goods?
"...we need to help them through that whole experience.""
Oh... let's help them through it. Until it ends. When they become adults and life gets even harder. As it will. As it does.
It reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's definition of the meaning of life (via his son). "We're here to help each other get through it. Whatever it is."
Despite the suggestion in these articles that the mental illness epidemic is particularly defined in the young, the actual rates of depression are relatively low in under 18s. And suicide is still the preserve of white males aged in their 40s. So the young do have something to look forward to.
While there is a sense that the young are being medicalized in the traditional sense, as suffering the stresses we all experience, there is also a sense that millennials and whatever comes after them are facing a different existential crisis to other generations before. Of course, one could be glib and say that Victorian working class children (or indeed children in many developing countries) had it tougher but that's missing the point. Harsh physical conditions affect you mentally, of course, but children in western countries, particularly the US and UK because of their particular economic models, face a peculiar period of vast riches in technology, consumable goods, information yet also face a time when time itself is managed to micro seconds, where our culture is based upon visual media and how we appear, a conformity coded through advertizing and popular culture and a peculiar rudderless morality (religion is awful but it did create a social framework, what has replaced it?) based upon consumption that is against our own long term interests.
The future is bleak because it is. Can anyone honestly offer some Utopian view of society in 2050? If our social landscape is that bleak then how on earth can our individual psychological landscape not be profoundly affected?
* Though it probably does.
Not only is there a worsening crisis in the mental health of our fresh faced recent arrivals but to make matters worse, accessing support services is getting harder. Literally no one could predict this outcome from cutting taxes and public spending.
So, there have been numerous articles recently decrying the appalling lack of provision of mental health care, specifically for young people, and highlighting the fact that either there are far more young people experiencing mental illness or that health services have magically got better at spotting it and thus more are being diagnosed. More are certainly taking medication. Two recent BBC pieces found anti-depressant prescriptions for under 12 year olds has risen by 27% over the last three years (to be fair it's a small number so any increase might look more severe) and a general increase in the number of antidepressants prescribed to children.
Both BBC articles carry the same image that doesn't help our understanding of the problem. A stroppy adolescent.
What's going on? Some frontline mental health service providers are calling it a silent catastrophe, teachers are calling it an epidemic and the British government are calling it the EU's fault, once we're free of their shackles our wellbeing will return.
"Almost four in five (78%) teachers have seen a pupil struggle with a mental health problem in the past year, with one in seven (14%) cases involving suicidal thoughts or behaviour."
It's interesting to correlate that with surveys of teaching staff:
"An overwhelming number of teachers in the UK have suffered either physically or mentally because of their jobs, a study has suggested.
The research, commissioned by the charity Education Support Partnership, indicated 75% of teaching staff in schools and colleges experienced symptoms stemming from their work.
An earlier survey indicated 62% of the working population was affected.
Depression, anxiety and panic attacks were among the conditions cited." BBC
So about the same percent of teachers and students are depressed. God, schools are miserable, hopeless places. Close them all down, I say. Let the kids run free. And the teachers too. And then kids and teachers can co-exist in mutual harmony like lions and gazelles...blah blah.
On the frontline of health services:
"The report...exposes a “serious and worsening crisis” for the health service through a survey of those working in child and adolescent mental health services (Camhs), says trusts are being hollowed out and specialist services are disappearing owing to underfunding and the transformation and redesign of services in recent years."
Who would have thought that tax cuts and...oh yeah...And
"Almost 400,000 children and young people a year in England are being treated for mental health problems, the highest number ever, NHS figures show.
There were a total of 389,727 “active referrals” for people aged 18 or younger in April, a third higher than the same month two years ago, according to the latest statistics published by NHS Digital.
The number seeking help for conditions such as anxiety, depression and eating disorders is rising sharply." The Guardian
That does sound like a lot. I mean I have no idea how many people in the UK are under 18, actually the 2011 census shows that there's about 9 million 8-19 year olds, so it's relatively low (about 9%). Of course, we have a halcyon idea of what childhood should be like so there's an assumption that these are the happy times before life takes you by the hand and leads you down misery land.
However, there's one thing that can always put misery in perspective, the words "In the US it's even worse." It is, of course. America, land of the free, home of the mentally ill. That's not me being Americallergic (it's a classification in the DSM 5) it's just the way it is. The freer the country the more insane the people. Or rather, there is a correlation between the most consumer capitalist least social democratic countries and madness. Why could this be?
We in Europe tend to sit back disgruntled mumbling, bloody Yanks, they're the best at everything.
What is going on?
In a world where the government are proposing beginning academic testing from aged 4 and children are routinely tested aged 7, 11, 16, 18, 21 and beyond and inbetween, where media is ubiquitous through internet, TV, smartphones, tablets and games machines, where the young are exposed constantly to images of perfection (alongside graphic porn), where conformity is rewarded through brand loyalty, where consumption defines us, and with climate change there quite literally is no future, what could be causing this wave of anxiety and depression among the young?
It's a mystery.
Is it simply that young people don't like being examined, sexualized, sold, objectified and feeling hopeless? Or is it something deeper? Something to do with brain inflammation or chemical imbalance or genetic disposition.
It would be odd if we didn't accept that the high rates of depression and anxiety among the teaching profession (I was a scarred combat veteran myself) is down to the actual profession rather than suggesting all those teachers had a brain inflammation or were genetically disposed to going mad in the face of a hostile, stressful and thankless environment. So why would we not think that children facing a horribly uncertain future in a media saturated present, consistently under pressure to perform, would not experience depression because of these very things?
But that's not really the priority. Of the government. The health service. Schools. Or indeed all the articles discussing this silent epidemic catastrophe tsunami. It's about accessing services and preventative measures:
"When it comes to young people in extreme distress or at risk of suicide, effective crisis services and access to support are utterly essential. But so too is preventing youngsters from reaching a crisis in the first place," writes Mary O'Hara in The Guardian.
What are these services?
"Psychotherapists warned of “a serious and worsening crisis” following a survey of staff in child and adolescent mental health services (Camhs)."
Now, I confess that when I worked in psychotherapy and in teaching I never heard anyone offer a good word about camhs unfortunately, so I am a little biased. But camhs have an in depth study in the area called, whisper it, Silent Catastrophe. And they offer an in depth description of what good services might look like (page 6). Having read it I'm just as clueless. It seems to be management speak about how the services should be run rather than what they should be. Therapy? Who knows?
It could simply be letting kids take it all out with a hammer on a bobo doll.
"Dr Bernadka Dubicka, who chairs the child and adolescent faculty at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: "Currently only one in four children and young people are treated for their mental health problems.
"The fact that prescriptions for antidepressants are rising could reflect a slow but steady move towards treating everyone who is unwell."
Unwell. Oh my. I have a slight depressive eating disordered head cold, here are some pills that will make it all go away or make you so sedated you won't care.
A more reasoned response is offered by
Marc Bush, chief policy advisor at Young Minds: "...front-line professionals are turning to prescription pads, because they're thinking, 'I'm seeing someone in front of me in crisis with a level of distress I don't want to leave them with - how do I offer them some kind of alleviation from that?'"
All the pieces I've read have suggested "the need for preventative, early intervention and specialist services." I'm always a bit alarmed when the words preventative and early intervention are used. How would you prevent or intervene early in children's mental health?
"In the US, concerns about young people’s mental health have come to the fore lately, too, including for common problems like anxiety, depression and suicide. Suicide is the second biggest cause of death for 10- to 24-year-olds in the US."
Of course, the first biggest cause is school shootings. Ironically carried out by mentally ill young people. If you were completely heartless you would just arm all American 10 year olds and watch them battle out their inner demons in a Battle Royale infotainment style reality show. If you were heartless that is.
Battle Royale has become the standard trope of Young Adult fiction, most notably The Hunger Games and...I dunno I'm an Old Adult; Divergent, Delirium, Despairum
So schools and families are the problem? Isn't this what RD Laing was saying back in the 1960s?
Of course, if you obsessively test children (or not obsessively at all actually, I completed a first Eng Lit degree with no exams and it was a joy) then, well, shock horror, this causes massive stress. Not only from the exams themselves but it reinforces wider social needs, the need to conform and to belong and the ridiculous idea of succeeding, when, of course, your family and postcode has already defined your level of 'success' (the testing process is, of course, to divide the
Yet all the media pieces I cite here do not talk about a culture change but rather investing in services (never explicitly stating what these services are and how they work or, most importantly, how effective they are). That my friends is the very definition of a sticky plaster. It is the equivalent of facing up to the current climate breakdown with wildfires across the globe by banning drinking straws. It seems like you're doing something but you're actually completely ignoring the cause or facing up to the need for changing behaviours.
Children not only face a far more complex education system than the one I grew up in in the 1970s (yes, I'm old) but also face uncertainty in the work place where an imposed flexible workforce is the preferred economic model. Preferred by corporations, of course, and thus by governments. They face the "no future," that Johnny Rotten once screamed, of climate collapse. This is perhaps the first generation with no discernible future projection. The baby boomers of the 50s and 60s had a dream that technology would free us and we would live a life of ease. The technology we have far supersedes anything they could have dreamed of yet we work longer hours, children study longer in order to scavenge for employment. There is no pleasure in learning and not even an attempt to pretend there is. No one denies school is an apprenticeship for work now. The young can't dream of the day when they can put their tools aside and live on a comfortable pension. We're told that an ageing population means this generation are going to have fend for themselves and work until they drop.
"Help must include a concerted focus on groups that face additional inequalities, such as LGBTQ youth who are much more likely to experience common mental health problems. Research shows that almost twice as many young LGBTQ people in the UK (44%) have considered suicide compared with heterosexual non-trans young people (26%)," writes O'Hara.
I thought we were all now completely informed and understanding about boys being poofs and acting like girls. It seems not.
Back in my youth (me, far right) you could hang out with other boys and there was no stigma. Apart from the beatings.
Here's another BBC piece:
"When she was 15, Naomi Lea was suffering up to 10 panic attacks a day and self-harming.
Struggling with the pressure of social media and anxious about exams, she felt isolated and scared...
Young people are spending a lot of their time online and there's the pressures of seeing other people going out and feeling lonely about that and then also that pressure to portray yourself a certain way online, which is something I really struggled with," she said.
"I was seeing that everyone else was portraying these perfect lives and I didn't feel like I had that so you automatically make that comparison which then makes you feel worse.
"There's such an emphasis on your appearance and that links in with social media. People take thousands of selfies but just post one that they like online and there's just this pressure to portray yourself as this perfect person.""
Naomi Lea at home with her hallucinogenic mind altering tile collection.
We're preoccupied with appearance, as befits a society that is obsessed with watching. More disturbingly, we watch ourselves. Children are brought up in a smartphone social media culture where behaviour is regulated by peers and advertizing. The average 6 year old now sees more adverts in the time it took me to write that than the average adult saw in a whole lifetime in 1508.
Advertizing is by definition about conformity. An advertizing saturated society is helplessly conformist. And in a conformist society choice is limited, again by definition. Children now have less agency than my own generation. That's a damning backwards step. Agency is linked to depression (working class people are far more likely to be diagnosed). I don't need actual evidence for this, of course...oh god, alright, just look at cultures by decade and compare mainstream to subcultures. The 1950s youth rebellion was merely a reflection of the ideal consumerist society. With slicker hair. But something radically altered in the 1960s and a true counter culture formed, for good or ill. Where is the counter culture for young people now? How does the average 18 year old tune in and drop out? Where is their freedom to choose?
School makes you conform so much you become a mere speck in one of those visual puzzle pictures. Can you see the 3D image of a happy meaningful existence?
If this were all correct, that it's the way our society is structured that causes our mental illness, then the obvious answer to the children madness silent epidemic thing is to change how society is structured. There's compelling evidence that grown up adult people are increasingly bewildered by the complexity of our society (see Paul Arbair's take on Brexit) and they've seen it happen so for children now, knowing nothing else, it must be a bewildering hopeless maze.
But just as all the recent coverage of astonishing heatwaves across the world was belatedly linked to climate change no one in the media coverage actually points out what we should do about it. Because it's both obvious and untenable. Change our society? It's not going to happen.
It's better to medicalize 'the fault.' And treat it as if it were a biological phenomena.
However, the report by the Association of Child Psychotherapists cited in The Guardian does throw a spanner in the works of the biomedical model of intervention.
"...The service was redesigned and now does not meet the needs of a large section of the population who have significant mental health needs. There is no time for proper assessments and treatment...
Treatment is focused on symptoms rather than the whole child or young person in context, it continues. Children and young people are left to “get worse before being seen” and there is an “increasing mismatch between need and treatment offered”. [my italics]"
And
"England's Children's Commissioner Anne Longfield says there is currently a children's mental health epidemic.
"The fact of the matter is that poor mental health has become part and parcel of childhood for many many children and it affects every aspects of their lives as they grow up, these formative years.
"I think we are seeing a real shift here in children's mental health.
"It affects their achievements in school, their friendships, their self-confidence, their self-belief and ultimately their future. And I think it's happened fast and it's happened at scale."" BBC
Blimey.
But once again, after suggesting there's a major sea change here: "almost 20% of girls at 14 now have a diagnosed mental health condition. A quarter of teenage girls are diagnosed with depression. This isn't something which is a small blip here and there. This is something which so many parents around the country know because it's happening to their children or children in the country."
This is an epidemic of staggering proportions, it's happening now, unlike any other time, so what do we do about it?
""We know that children are bombarded with these unattainable lifestyles that they see from celebrities and online alike and they just can't compete. It's as if there's been a narrowing down of what success looks like.
"You have to look good, you have to be successful, it has to come quick. And then of course we've got the digital world which has come over the last ten years, not I believe, causing these things, but fuelling these things.
"So everything is fast, there's no downtime. Appearances are all. Academic achievement is important of course, but has become a major major focus in schools and that makes it very difficult for children to find their way through.
I'm not seeking to medicalise childhood here at all, but I think children are experiencing a much more complicated existence than many of us adults did..."
What does Anne Longfield suggest we do? Change the education system? Make them throw away their phones and rally in the streets? Resist the consumer culture, throw away our goods?
"...we need to help them through that whole experience.""
Oh... let's help them through it. Until it ends. When they become adults and life gets even harder. As it will. As it does.
It reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's definition of the meaning of life (via his son). "We're here to help each other get through it. Whatever it is."
Despite the suggestion in these articles that the mental illness epidemic is particularly defined in the young, the actual rates of depression are relatively low in under 18s. And suicide is still the preserve of white males aged in their 40s. So the young do have something to look forward to.
While there is a sense that the young are being medicalized in the traditional sense, as suffering the stresses we all experience, there is also a sense that millennials and whatever comes after them are facing a different existential crisis to other generations before. Of course, one could be glib and say that Victorian working class children (or indeed children in many developing countries) had it tougher but that's missing the point. Harsh physical conditions affect you mentally, of course, but children in western countries, particularly the US and UK because of their particular economic models, face a peculiar period of vast riches in technology, consumable goods, information yet also face a time when time itself is managed to micro seconds, where our culture is based upon visual media and how we appear, a conformity coded through advertizing and popular culture and a peculiar rudderless morality (religion is awful but it did create a social framework, what has replaced it?) based upon consumption that is against our own long term interests.
The future is bleak because it is. Can anyone honestly offer some Utopian view of society in 2050? If our social landscape is that bleak then how on earth can our individual psychological landscape not be profoundly affected?
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