Blair’s right, we must stop treating life’s ups & downs as mental health problems – it’s crippling the NHS
THE number of kids being referred for specialist anxiety treatment has doubled in just four years.
The Covid pandemic and the shameful, prolonged closure of schools will have played its part in this, along with the cost-of-living crisis and food poverty.
On top of all that, the pernicious rise of social media means that young minds rarely switch off.
But, encouraging young people to feel that they have a “mental health issue” when they might just be going through a bad patch is undoubtedly contributing to the problem too.
According to a recent report by the Office for National Statistics, nearly 25 per cent of children in England alone now have a “probable mental disorder”.
Yet in this #BeKind era when even the most sensible of cautionary advice is shot down in the flames of a Twitter/X storm, it’s become dangerous territory to even suggest that encouraging resilience might help to bring that number down.
So it’s refreshing to see former PM Tony Blair stick his neck out and utter something that, these days, many might see as shockingly outdated but is actually good, old-fashioned common sense.
“Life has its ups and downs and everybody experiences those. And you’ve got to be careful of encouraging people to think they’ve got some sort of condition other than simply confronting the challenges of life,” he says on the Jimmy’s Jobs Of The Future podcast.
“We need a proper conversation about this because you really cannot afford to be spending the amount of money we’re spending on mental health.”
Hear hear. A friend who works in the mental health sector has been warning of this snowballing crisis for years and says that those without the capacity to cope with life’s occasional struggles are siphoning resources away from those with genuine mental illness.
It doesn’t help that, in modern Britain, an entire industry has sprung up around the issue of young people’s mental health
What many of the older generation might have referred to as worry — an entirely normal emotion — has now been inflated to the status of anxiety by many, and the sadness that comes with loss or grief is often referred to as depression.
It doesn’t help that, in modern Britain, an entire industry has sprung up around the issue of young people’s mental health, with medical diagnoses and antidepressants now routinely handed out when it might simply be a bad week or month or passing mood.
Bandwagon effect
In her new book, Chemically Imbalanced, NHS psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff says that too many in her profession have been seduced by “the quest for money and professional status” and promote “barely useful and potentially harmful drugs” for life’s difficulties which, she claims, might be better tackled by addressing the problems making someone anxious and encouraging physical exercise or mindfulness.
A friend who owns a business says that employing young people is now a minefield.
Equally, social media platforms are peppered with celebrities emoting left, right and centre about every little feeling. In some cases, this can help when it speaks to someone’s own troubling experience and encourages them to process and understand their angst, deal with it and move on.
But other times it can have a bandwagon effect that, as Blair points out, can lead to the over-medicalisation of what are simply life’s ups and downs.
A friend who owns a business says that employing young people is now a minefield.
Plenty prove to be hard working and resilient, but there’s an increasing number of those inclined to repeatedly call in sick simply because they feel a bit “down” when, more often than not, leaving the house and getting on with the day is probably just what they need to pull them out of the doldrums.
Of course we should never seek to diminish or ignore genuine mental health issues, but neither should we indulge a tendency to catastrophise something that, given a bit of time and perspective, might be taken in stride.
“Keep calm and carry on” may have become a bit of a cliche, but there’s an undeniable power in that ethos and, if it helps someone to pick themselves up and get on with their day, it’s good for their wellbeing, not to mention the economy.
Better still, it frees up NHS resources to be channelled towards those who genuinely need professional help.
Jesy and Zion will need double dose of energy
LITTLE Mix’s Jesy Nelson’s relationship with rapper Zion Foster has reportedly been on and off since 2022.
At one point, they went travelling but the trip was cut short and they split up.
Now they have surprised fans with the announcement that, not only are they back together, but they’re expecting twins.
Congratulations to them.
Let’s hope they’re ready for the double hand grenade that’s coming their way. Having one new baby can put a strain on even the most established of relationships, so one can only imagine how stressful it might be to have two at the same time – particularly when they start running in different directions.
So let’s hope that Jesy, 33, and Zion, 26, have deep wells of energy, tolerance and patience.
For each other as much as their imminent offspring.
Gen Z raise bar
PHOTOS on social media show post-pandemic Gen Z have developed the habit of queuing in a single line at a bar rather than spreading across the length of it.
This is now the system in my local pub – and I love it.
When I was a barmaid, remembering who had been waiting longest to be served required Al- levels of recall.
And now I’m a customer “of a certain age”, severe dehydration can kick in before you are served in a bar full of 20-somethings, so a single queue is a much fairer system.
Cheers to that.
GP Dr Patrick Hart says he smashed petrol pumps with a hammer and chisel as an “act of care” as part of a Just Stop Oil protest.
He has been found guilty of criminal damage and jailed for a year, but now his fate as a GP is to be decided by a medical tribunal.
Whatever the outcome, the medical principle of “first, do no harm” applies to patients.
Perhaps it now needs to be extended to other people’s property too.
Keep it simple, stupid
ISRAELI neuroscientist Professor Idan Segev spent hours on his academic thesis before submitting it to a respected journal.
The verdict? “This is gobbledygook.”
That’s because the journal is now using under-11s to preview articles and assess how accessible, or otherwise, they are for non- specialists to understand.
Great idea. Perhaps this idea could be rolled out to appliance manufacturers too?
Then, instead of instruction books clearly written by tech-savvy types who already know how to use the product they’ve flogged you, they might make a modicum of sense to those of us who don’t know our widgets from our bevels.
Making up for it now
THE Beeb is to spend up to £1million a year on “make-up services” for its London-based news shows.
Some (i.e. me) might say this is long overdue now that Aunt Thomasina Cobbly and all are “camera ready” even for a trip to the shops.
Having been a TV pundit since dinosaurs roamed the male-dominated corridors of various news programmes, I remember the days when make-up artists saw it as a novelty to have a woman in their chair.
Consequently, you’d find yourself being dabbed with a faintly moist powder puff just seconds after it had graced the sweaty furrows of Roy Hattersley’s brow.
And, er, that was it.
Medics threat so sick
THERE was an item on the BBC news last week about paramedics dealing with being physically attacked on the job.
It beggars belief that someone might be moronic enough to harm someone trying to help them, but in this warped world we now live in, it’s a real and present danger.
One ambulance worker spoke of having his jaw broken by a man he was trying to treat.
And now a nurse in her fifties is in a critical condition after being “stabbed” by something other than a knife while working a shift at Royal Oldham Hospital in Greater Manchester.
A 37-year-old man has been arrested, so legal constraints prevent me from saying more at this stage. But whatever we’re paying frontline medics these days, they’ll soon need danger money too.