Quite regularly some new statistic appears about the increasing levels of mental health problems amongst children and young adults. The latest survey suggests one in five souls aged from eight to twenty-five had a “probable” mental health issue in 2023. It seems the conditions primarily blamed are anxiety, autism spectrum disorders, and depression. That does not indicate a healthy society.
Now, one plausible response to such stats is that young people nowadays are snowflakes, or at least that mental illness is over-diagnosed. Normal unhappiness, particularly older folks say, is being medicalised. And that would seem to be true, especially since child psychiatry services are so appallingly bad (they were awfully bad even twenty years ago, when I was practising medicine) that few of those developing problems can possibly have been formally diagnosed, or treated, by specialists. Many are unlikely even to have been able to access adequate GP services (and wonderful though we GPs may be, child psychiatry is not a core skill).
“Mental health issues” have been popularised at every level up to royalty, but the effect of raising public awareness whilst doing SFA to remedy them is simply to encourage self-diagnosis of any lack of happiness in medical terms. Psychology being what it is, one’s mental health issues even become as essential to social acceptance as owning the right phone. And so I am no longer surprised to hear a quite normal young person, describing a difficult adolescent interlude, refer to “overcoming my mental health issues.”
This is a dangerous trend. I can remember how dependent patients with chronic unhappiness due to poor social conditions and life-management skills, if they happened to get into the psychiatric system, began to pin their troubles on their “depression.” This had the dual effect of relieving them of responsibility for their well-being, and making it impossible for them to improve their own lot, since the psychiatrists relied on pharmacological therapies rather than character-building.
But much of the crap to which our young people are exposed, at a vulnerable time of their lives, not only fosters the navel-gazing self-diagnosis of mental illness, but seriously encourages the real thing. The fact is, our kids have every reason to be unhappy, anxious, and only loosely attached to reality. Much has been written about this, but listing some of it tends to make one wonder why it is not four in five, rather than one in five, who have debilitating anxiety or depression.
For a start, consider the high number of kids who start or finish school with broken families. That factor alone is a predictor of 500% greater likelihood of mental illness, so it might explain the entire trend. But not content with that, kids are taught in school that they are quite likely to be in the wrong body, or gay; that if not, they are certainly guilty of whiteness and inherited colonial guilt; that the world is ending anyway from climate change; that their parents are quite likely to be purveyors of harmful disinformation; that religions of all type (bar Christianity) demand respect, but that all the smart guys are above such woo. And so on.
Many of these myths are well-embedded by the time older kids begin to see the world as it is. They come to realise that, even when they are paying off mandatory university debts, they will never be able to get a job that enables property-ownership, and that real wages are set to keep dropping indefinitely, whilst taxation goes up until the entire fiat currency system collapses, and they lose everything. They are fully aware (if not the children of the privileged and their support-structures) that they are being replaced steadily by cheaper immigrants, and treated to racial double standards by every institution. If by adulthood, they’ve learned enough real history to love the heritage of their nation, they can see it being dismantled around them to be replaced by a dystopia. Seeking refuge in drink, drugs or pornography destabilises them even more, and embracing the readily available false ideologies, such as environmentalism or critical theory, is an even surer recipe for despair.
Meanwhile, many from an immigrant background have the option of finding meaning through Islamic radicalisation, which at least seems to result in a mental health defence in court, when it results in bloodshed. Sometimes that mental illness is real – young migrants in alien cultures have a demonstrably high rate of psychotic illness, even apart from the madness of their belief system. Lots of poor migrants means lots of psychosis.
Autism requires a special mention, since it did not exist in my own childhood. In other words, there are many indicators that a serious, uncommon, condition has become over-diagnosed in our time. But there are also indicators that the thing itself has become more prevalent. Throughout my school career I can think of one, perhaps two, classmates whose behaviour was disturbed enough that I’m pretty sure they would be diagnosed as autistic-spectrum disorder now. The fact that I saw rather more in my GP practice is, of course, natural given the nature of the job, but I think it was also more common by then. One of my own patients, diagnosed as Asperger’s, killed himself with an overdose – we think accidentally – after a troubled adolescence. I heard of no such event during my youth, or my medical training, even in the news.
I remember a conversation with two academics back in 2019, one of whom had become convinced, through a number of personal contacts, that increasing autism was related to the rates of childhood vaccination. The other attributed the rise to better diagnosis, but conceded that vaccines might, perhaps, trigger an onset that would have happened anyway. But debilitating autism has now become so common, affecting families from those of Bill Dembski to John Cullen, not to mention prominent, and clearly mentally “unusual,” activists like Chris Packham, that better diagnosis seems to be wearing thin as an explanation. And I doubt that the social factors causing anxiety and depression are adequate to cause such lifelong changes in brain function.
Readers will remember the furore over Dr Andrew Wakefield, but since COVID enocouraged some of us to look more closely at the safety record of the vaccine manufacturers, it is a lot less possible to say, with certainty, that the link between childhood vaccines and autism has been disproven. If only we could trust medical scientists to do science, we might be more confident.
The bottom line to all this is that, for all our society’s trumpeting about building a kinder society in general, and the importance of mental health in particular, our young people’s mental health, and/or their perception of it, is the worst of any society in any age. And that seems to me to be merely symptomatic of our entire society’s shaking foundations. Far from building back better after COVID or colonialism, we have been tearing our land apart. That’s a black pill conclusion, but at least it steers us away from superficial discussion of increasing health budgets, gender transitioning more children, arresting the entire working class and so on. Britain’s entire direction over the last few decades has been wrong, we were better off in the past, and we ought to think again. It’s all about societal judgement, and repentance, and reformation. To quote, as I sometimes do, Larry Norman:
Don’t ask me for the answers, I’ve only got one,
That a man leaves his darkness when he follows the Son.
Fortunately, that truth applies to young people caught up in this mess as well – teach your children well, Christian parents!
Agree wholeheartedly, Jon.
I am risking repeating you with the following personal reflections:
During my thirteen years a schoolchild I was never aware of any of my peers having mental health problems, and I’m sure that wasn’t simply due to my being unobservant.
Individual, family and societal cohesion and well-being have degenerated dramatically throughout my lifetime. There is no doubt about it. As a GP, I have been in ‘privileged’ position to observe this at first hand, and to learn more about it from my wife and daughter, both of whom have taught in primary schools for decades.
In the early 1990’s I received a letter about a child registered with me from a consultant psychiatrist. The diagnosis he had made was ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder’. Seriously. For me it was a laugh out loud moment. My own diagnosis, which I did not record for fear of censure, was ‘Discipline Deficiency Disorder’.
In those days ADHD was still a fairly uncommon diagnosis; but now half the world seems to exhibit it, including many adults. In the latter years of my practice, ADHD, autism, PTSD, ME, et al, have become commonplace, and often the diagnoses are wielded by the patients almost as if they are a virtue (“Before I tell you what I’ve come about, doc, I should just tell you that I’m ‘on the spectrum’.”)
All this so-called mental ill-health has had its knock-on effect on the UK work force, as is evidenced by the large numbers of folk who are physically fit for work but not inclined to seek employment. Ten years or so ago I worked for a year in my local Disability Benefit assessments unit, as the title suggests examining folk who were claiming social security benefits because they said they were unfit to do a job. I lasted only a year as I could no longer stomach the numbers who were clearly playing the system, a system that was designed to allow them to do so.
GPs are first in the firing line as they have to issue a ‘fit note’ (previously referred to as a ‘sick line’). It used to be a little easier – appendicectomy, broken leg, severe depression; at least the majority of them were obviously sick. Now, “My boyfriend has left me and I’m too unhappy to work” seems to be sufficient for a fortnight off. On one occasion a 19yr old asked me for a fit note because he said, unashamedly, that he ‘didn’t feel motivated’ (sic); he wasn’t unwell, mentally or physically, in any traditional sense. I agreed to his request and wrote, ‘Doesn’t feel motivated’ on the Fit Note as the reason for not working; I was sure that would get him hauled in for assessment, and it did. Few shirkers are that blatant, and it is much easier for the GP to comply with a suspect claim than to get into an argument. It’s difficult to dispute a patient’s contention that they ‘can’t concentrate enough to work’.
Whilst there will be a small number of complaints with physical components (like ME and ‘long Covid’, if you believe in such things) that have contributed to the increase in benefits claimants, much of it is due to the burgeoning burden of so-called mental health disorders. It’s a mess.
The remedy? I’ll go with your solution, “It’s all about societal judgement, and repentance, and reformation.” Since that doesn’t appear to be about to happen any time soon, I’ll try not to get depressed myself. After all, as the title of Larry Norman’s album says, I’m “Only Visiting This Planet”.
Peter
I must have been in a black spot of mental illness. Apart from my two quasi-autisms, when I was small, Mum’s friend’s son Peter, up the road, was sent to a child psychiatrist, and Mum was scandalised that his Dad (a hardworking window cleaner and sweep) was held to blame, when my Mum was pretty sure here friend’s lack of proper discipline was the cause of his throwing toys out of the window and so on. I probably agree.
Then there was Craig, who developed an adolescent psychosis in the sixth form and was sent home after staring into space for an entire Private Study period. I suspect his visiting a Mystic didn’t help.
But those apart, nothing – and nobody had any food intolerances either, which are the bane of the Messy Church here nowadays.
When everything is better these days, all richer, more fun its hard to believe real kids aremore mentally troubled then before. So I don’t. The bible vteaches we have a soul. its impossible for a immaterial thing to be affected by the physical world. therefore what is affected is the mind. i see the mind as exclusively a memory operation. so all these mental problems, autism spectrum, or anything are just triggering problems with the memory or the memory itself in some cases. So drugs do work because they affect the triggering mechanism. Yes more kids are looked at, and yes people are weaker these days despite things better then ever. yet most of it is just triggering issues and not serious. Thats also why its more boys then girls and more of the upper class.