Mental health

Something strange is happening with teenagers’ mental health. In Britain, the US, Australia and beyond, the same trend can be seen: around the middle of the last decade, the number of young people with anxiety, depression and even suicidal tendancies started to rise sharply. Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, noticed a change when students who were brought up with smartphones started to arrive on campus. They were angrier. More fragile. More likely to take offence. Social media, he concluded, was shaping their view that society is in permanent conflict, which in turn led to ideas about microaggressions and competitive victimhood. All this,

Shortly after the first Covid lockdown ended, doctors began to notice something so strange that at first they struggled to explain it. There appeared to be a sudden rise in the number of children being referred with Tourette’s syndrome. Tourette’s is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by repetitive, involuntary movements or sounds called ‘tics’. While mild tics are relatively common in children, specialists suddenly started seeing large numbers of children displaying complex and debilitating symptoms. Dr Alasdair Parker, president of the British Paediatric Neurology Association, said in 2021: ‘The most severe tics disorders I have seen over the past 20 years have all presented in the last five months to

My favourite Martin Amis novel was his 1991 book Time’s Arrow. It is a pyrotechnically brilliant work in which all time goes backwards. On publication it was criticised in some quarters because the novel includes a reverse version of the Holocaust and some thought Amis was using the Holocaust as a literary device. As so often, these transient critics didn’t get the point. It is hard to say anything new about the Holocaust or find any new angle on it. Europe, like Canada, does not believe in the death penalty for criminals. Only for victims But Amis managed, because towards the end of the novel (that is, at the beginning

It is easy to laugh at young people asking for sympathy because ‘I’ve got mental health’. I think I heard the journalist-turned-teacher Lucy Kellaway on the wireless recently noticing in a half-baffled way the tendency of pupils to call mental illness mental health. Mental health hasn’t quite achieved that meaning in standard speech, but it could. It is partly a matter of euphemism. Mad and madness are now hardly usable at all with reference to everyday circumstances, being reserved for different times and cultures, for King Nebuchadnezzar, King Lear or King George. A mental case is ‘increasingly avoided’, noted the Oxford English Dictionary in its 21st-century revision of entries that

Two articles last weekend made me feel sorry for American young people. We in the anti-woke brigade can be awfully hard on kids. But having been born in the 20th century turns out to have been a stroke of good fortune. On Sunday, the New York Times ran a feature about soaring mental illness in American teenagers. Between 2007 and 2018, suicide rates among people aged ten to 24 rose by 60 per cent. Between 2015 and 2019, prescriptions for antidepressants for teenagers rose 38 per cent. Between 2009 and 2019, emergency room visits for self-inflicted injuries among people aged ten to 19 doubled for both sexes; for girls, they

I hate weed. Week after week, I see the tragic effects of this substance and how it destroys the minds of the young. I work on a mental health ward which, like many around the country, is home to some of the victims of our current lackadaisical attitude towards cannabis. This drug is particularly dangerous to the developing brains of young people and yet we know that this age group are the most likely to be experimenting with it. Despite protestations from the powerful pro–cannabis lobby, it has been proved beyond doubt that cannabis use is associated with depression, anxiety, psychosis and avolition (poor motivation). A third of psychosis cases

The outstanding gymnast Simone Biles has pulled out of several Olympic events, saying: ‘I just don’t trust myself as much any more.’ Many took the view that this was a fashionable ‘mental health’ issue. Ancient Greeks might have come up with a rather different analysis. Plutarch (c. ad 100) is said to have been the author of a letter of condolence to one Apollonius whose son had just died. In it he considered how best one should react to loss in the context of the whole field of human suffering, which Greeks regarded as the common lot of all mankind. For example, Achilles in the Iliad claimed that Zeus possessed

I wonder if the royal family realise how lucky they are to have Kate? She may have been born a commoner, but she is proving herself to be the best asset the Firm have. As naff as this sounds, she comes across as actually caring and wanting to use her position of power and influence to do some good which is quite refreshing in today’s self-obsessed, navel-gazing world where those in the public eye only seem to care if there’s a long-lens camera trained on them while they do their good deeds. Along with William she has championed causes such as mental health which were profoundly uncool when they first

‘Oh, I do so love to see all the lovely pheasants running around the place,’ said the lady walking the Alsatian up the farm track. The huge dog was straining at the leash, pulling her along, but she was trying to stop for a chat with the builder boyfriend as he mended a fence. I came alongside them in my car as I arrived at the farm to ride Darcy. I got out and joined the tail end of the conversation, in which the builder b took it upon himself to explain to this sweet lady that the pheasants got shot. Look, he had to. She was under the impression