Don’t let these figures depress you, girls

Are British teenagers suffering from an epidemic of mental illness? Yes, according to a ‘government-funded study’ which found that 24 per cent of 14-year-old girls are suffering from depression. This has been seized upon by critics of Conservative education policies; they see it as ‘proof’ that the increased focus on teaching children knowledge, as well as more frequent testing and the GCSE reforms, have literally driven children mad. ‘One in four girls is clinically depressed by the time they turn 14,’ reported the Guardian.

I’m sceptical about this and I took a look at the research carried out by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, which is based at UCL Institute for Education. It involved asking 14-year-olds in the Millennium Cohort Study to fill out a questionnaire called Short Moods and Feelings. This is an American document that uses the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ criteria for depression. It lists 13 symptoms in the form of first-person statements like ‘I thought I could never be as good as other kids’ and asks respondents to indicate ‘Not true’, ‘Sometimes’ or ‘True’, depending on how often they’ve experienced these feeling in the past two weeks.