Jasmin Glynne // Grey Court School

Mental health is becoming an increasing issue in modern life, and it is an issue that now affects many young people. According to Young Minds 1 in 10 children and young people aged between 5 and 16 in the UK suffer from a diagnosable mental health disorder, meaning nearly 850,000 children and teenagers are suffering.

There is a tweet that has been finding it's way around many social medias; facebook, tumblr, pinterest, reddit, etc. that caught my attention a while ago. 'Psychologists believe high school students in 2013 have the same anxiety levels as insane asylum patients.' Now initially I thought, as you the reader might well be thinking, that this is absurd. But after researching a little further I found that for that past 15 years, maybe more, psychologists have found student stress levels to be the same as asylum patients. The tweet may have been slightly wrong, as an article I found from 2008 stated the anxiety levels were actually the same as 1950's patients, but in the grand scheme of things what difference does that really make? Whether it's anxiety levels from the 1950's patients or today's, this fact shows us that the anxiety levels are stupidly high, especially for people at such a young age. In the UK, 290,000 children and young people have an anxiety disorder.

Now anxiety isn't even the tip of the iceberg, there are so many more mental health issues that so many teenagers are suffering. Eating disorders, depression, self harm and suicide and just a few of the problems. There has been a drastic increase in some of these issues as well, for example over the last 10 years there has been a 68% increase in the number of young people admitted to hospital because of self harm and the number of young people aged 15-16 with depression has nearly doubled between the 1980s and 2000s. And the question we must ask ourselves is why? I think that society holds a lot of the blame, but I think another part may be how we are educating our young people.

Perhaps I just have a bad memory, but in my 3 years of secondary school I can't remember once being educated about issues such as self harm. Sure they have been briefly mentioned and sometimes discussed when class discussions go astray, but I think young people really do need to be fully educated about such topics. At school I have heard many people saying that suicide is stupid, self harm and depression is attention seeking and not having a basic understanding of why people have eating disorders. It makes me wonder if people are just trying to be really annoying or funny or if they genuinely don't understand how people struggle with such issues. The lack of education on these subjects also makes people who are struggling feel isolated, like they are alone, like having a mental disorder is a bad thing and that they can't speak out and get help.

Last month I read 'The Pyschopath Test' by Jon Ronson. At one part Ronson states 'complicated human behaviour was increasingly getting labeled as a mental disorder... Did it matter? Were there consequences?' During his investigation of this concept he discusses the mis-diagnosis of many mental disorders in children, particularly in the US. For example, childhood bipolar. Many children are getting wrongly diagnosed with bipolar, just because they are laughing one second and crying the next. That may seem stupid as it is just normal child behaviour, but psychiatrists are wrongly diagnosing children because of this. This means that drug companies are getting more and more money as more of their bipolar drugs are being sold, and wrongly given to children, which proves to be fatal. Rebecca Riley was given an overdose of anti-psychotic drugs, which hadn't been approved for children, as her parents had gotten into the habit of giving them to her to shut her up. She died because of this and her parents were convicted of murder. So does this mean that some of the statistics given earlier are wrong as the disorders were misdiagnosed? Perhaps it does. But that doesn't make it any less of a problem.

Mental Health in teenagers is a big problem, I think we can safely say. A problem we need to overcome by educating others, raising awareness and helping people who suffer. We're all so wrapped up in our own worlds of troubles that we're forgetting others have problems too, that perhaps require more attention than ours, and that we should be able to help them overcome.