Generation Anxious: Are We Failing Our Children?
Discussion
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyd1l0lge8o
More than one million children in England were referred to mental health services last year, with anxiety the most common reason. Referrals have almost doubled since 2018-19, while suspected autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions have also risen sharply.
While it is only a feeling, I do wonder how much influence social media is having on all of this.
Are children’s mental health problems genuinely increasing, are we simply recognising them better, are services now unable to cope?
Im nearly 53 and I've struggled with anxiety all my life - Looking back I had it when very young and went unrecognised for a long time.
More than one million children in England were referred to mental health services last year, with anxiety the most common reason. Referrals have almost doubled since 2018-19, while suspected autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions have also risen sharply.
While it is only a feeling, I do wonder how much influence social media is having on all of this.
Are children’s mental health problems genuinely increasing, are we simply recognising them better, are services now unable to cope?
Im nearly 53 and I've struggled with anxiety all my life - Looking back I had it when very young and went unrecognised for a long time.
That is 10% of children with potential mental health issues.
One in 10.
I wonder if we are lining up some children for a lifetime on benefits.
One of my Great Nephews is clearly on the spectrum. Thankfully he is high functioning, but his parents have refused to get him assessed as they don't want him labelled for the rest of his life.
Another nephew has been diagnosed as neurodivergent. From an outsider, it looks like bad parenting as he drinks two litres of coke a day and wonders why he doesn't sleep. He is apparently seeing a specialist, but I'm not sure it is making a difference.
This is the thing. Do any of those children with a mental health diagnosis and getting treatment, does it actually make a difference?
One in 10.
I wonder if we are lining up some children for a lifetime on benefits.
One of my Great Nephews is clearly on the spectrum. Thankfully he is high functioning, but his parents have refused to get him assessed as they don't want him labelled for the rest of his life.
Another nephew has been diagnosed as neurodivergent. From an outsider, it looks like bad parenting as he drinks two litres of coke a day and wonders why he doesn't sleep. He is apparently seeing a specialist, but I'm not sure it is making a difference.
This is the thing. Do any of those children with a mental health diagnosis and getting treatment, does it actually make a difference?
I think what was once called personality (naughty, nervous, focused, energetic), is now considered a disorder. I think these things have always existed, but are now more openly discussed (rightly or wrongly).
Not to mention that schools also receive more funding for every 'diagnosed' SEN child.
Not to mention that schools also receive more funding for every 'diagnosed' SEN child.
I went to the cinema at the weekend, a young girl came in and sat next to us, she was about 10, with two carers, she was shouting and banging her chest every couple of minutes and breathing as if she was having a choking fit, and then she'd stand up, turn around 360 degrees on the spot and calmly sit down as if she didn't have a care in the world.
It was quite the distraction, it was every couple of minutes for the entire duration of the film, must be exhausting for her.
It was quite the distraction, it was every couple of minutes for the entire duration of the film, must be exhausting for her.
I think schools take a share of the blame here.
A relative's school has repeatedly tried to get him diagnosed with various mental health ailments, each time the professional answer comes back no a few months later the school suggests something else. The poor kid now thinks theres something wrong with him.
My son's school tried it too with a suspected hearing issue because sometimes he doesnt listen to the teacher
A relative's school has repeatedly tried to get him diagnosed with various mental health ailments, each time the professional answer comes back no a few months later the school suggests something else. The poor kid now thinks theres something wrong with him.
My son's school tried it too with a suspected hearing issue because sometimes he doesnt listen to the teacher
Did we have a focus on mental health issues from WW2?
Kids in London and other cities were sent to live with strangers, Dads sent to fight and some never came home. Mental health was rarely discussed and if it was, it was done in whispers as mental health problems was considered a taboo thing.
Whilst I think awareness and discussion of mental health is a good thing, it does seem that a few use it as an excuse or a badge of honour. Especially if it gets more on benefits.
Kids in London and other cities were sent to live with strangers, Dads sent to fight and some never came home. Mental health was rarely discussed and if it was, it was done in whispers as mental health problems was considered a taboo thing.
Whilst I think awareness and discussion of mental health is a good thing, it does seem that a few use it as an excuse or a badge of honour. Especially if it gets more on benefits.
Dog Biscuit said:
While it is only a feeling, I do wonder how much influence social media is having on all of this.
We also need to take the blame as adults for climate change, huge pressure academically, lack of play (this is a huge one), lack of time outdoors in nature, massive disparity in wealth with growing poverty, all sorts of dietary and exercise issues and so much more. We have f*CK*d the planet over and destroyed childhood as it used to be. And then we look Pikachu shocked face when our kids cannot cope...Childhood and teenage angst is nothing new. My generation grew up with the intro of 2 tribes - the 3 minute warning siren - etched into their consciousness. I've spoken to a few contemporaries about that ongoing, overhanging sense of doom.
Kids today don't have that, but instead a great many other potential sources of anxiety; social media, body dysmorphia, a nation seemingly, potentially in economic decline.
What has also changed is the preparedness of people to recognise mental health. There's less stigma. Things like PTSD, for example, are still only just being fully understood, even if the armed forces have yet to take full responsibility for veterans. So in part, maybe is okay to be not okay today, ,in a way it wasn't before?
Kids today don't have that, but instead a great many other potential sources of anxiety; social media, body dysmorphia, a nation seemingly, potentially in economic decline.
What has also changed is the preparedness of people to recognise mental health. There's less stigma. Things like PTSD, for example, are still only just being fully understood, even if the armed forces have yet to take full responsibility for veterans. So in part, maybe is okay to be not okay today, ,in a way it wasn't before?
Likely a combination of increasing prevalence and diagnosis.
But, I'm curious about the affect of language and increased discussion around the whole thing. My grandad (born 1925, no longer with us) would say when he was younger, "anxiety" just didn't exist in the common lexicon.
Obviously, anxiety did exist as a condition back then, but language shapes a lot and I wonder if mental health has been made into such a big thing that loads of kids who might have a normal amount of anxiety about an exam or a date are now wondering if they have generalised anxiety and which reinforces that type of thinking and actually do end up with much worse anxiety than they otherwise would have.
Resilience is another thing which seems to be severely lacking in gen z.
But, I'm curious about the affect of language and increased discussion around the whole thing. My grandad (born 1925, no longer with us) would say when he was younger, "anxiety" just didn't exist in the common lexicon.
Obviously, anxiety did exist as a condition back then, but language shapes a lot and I wonder if mental health has been made into such a big thing that loads of kids who might have a normal amount of anxiety about an exam or a date are now wondering if they have generalised anxiety and which reinforces that type of thinking and actually do end up with much worse anxiety than they otherwise would have.
Resilience is another thing which seems to be severely lacking in gen z.
Kids eating a bag of crisps for breakfast, washed down with Redbull and bags of sweets for snacks during the day, followed by a Maccy D's for dinner. THIS is the main reason kids are out of control, and anyone who thinks otherwise is simply wrong. My Daughter works in an admittedly particularly bad school, and sees it every day. Non of them, at least the ones she has to deal with eat a proper meal. The parents (or more likely mum and new violent boyfriend) are feckless losers who are most often on drugs. Yes, social media plays a big bad part...but it's just an easy thing to blame while ignoring the real problems.
Slow.Patrol said:
That is 10% of children with potential mental health issues.
One in 10.
I wonder if we are lining up some children for a lifetime on benefits.
One of my Great Nephews is clearly on the spectrum. Thankfully he is high functioning, but his parents have refused to get him assessed as they don't want him labelled for the rest of his life.
Another nephew has been diagnosed as neurodivergent. From an outsider, it looks like bad parenting as he drinks two litres of coke a day and wonders why he doesn't sleep. He is apparently seeing a specialist, but I'm not sure it is making a difference.
This is the thing. Do any of those children with a mental health diagnosis and getting treatment, does it actually make a difference?
My daughter has been diagnosed Autistic and ADHD, we went through the process because she developed OCD like behaviours which would change, some were typical OCD such as having to press a light switch a set number of times, having to step backwards and forwards a number of times before entering a room but one was getting quite dangerous which was not walking down the bottom 3 stairs at home and jumping every time over them. She had other behaviours at school such as an issue with sitting still for too long in lesson, but she is very good at masking and would do things like drop something on the floor just to have a reason to stand and pick it up again. One in 10.
I wonder if we are lining up some children for a lifetime on benefits.
One of my Great Nephews is clearly on the spectrum. Thankfully he is high functioning, but his parents have refused to get him assessed as they don't want him labelled for the rest of his life.
Another nephew has been diagnosed as neurodivergent. From an outsider, it looks like bad parenting as he drinks two litres of coke a day and wonders why he doesn't sleep. He is apparently seeing a specialist, but I'm not sure it is making a difference.
This is the thing. Do any of those children with a mental health diagnosis and getting treatment, does it actually make a difference?
We went through a long process to get her diagnosed and try to get help, despite what people think it's very hard to get any help and diagnosis, the waiting list is years on the NHS now, we had to go private initially.
The NHS child mental health services are too keen to diagnose a child with anxiety when they become involved because it is the easiest option and doesn't require the same level of qualification from a professional, it can often be wrong as it was with my daughter.
The issues started appearing when she was around 8 and definitely Covid and the isolation it caused increased her problems, she was diagnosed at 11 with ADHD and then Autism, the Autism diagnosis definitely knocked her sideways in a big way and put her on a downward spiral, she knew others who were diagnosed Autistic and didn't like the association, my daughter is high functioning to use a phrase and is very intelligent, she is pretty much at the top of her year group and is taking her first GCSE's a year early.
The Autism diagnosis sent her in a downward spiral, she didn't get much support at all from health services or the school, it was really like they diagnosed her and then left it.
At around 12 she developed an obsession with eating, calories and weight loss, bare in mind she has always been on the athletic side of slim, very into sport and had her ab muscles visible. over 6 months she dropped from about 53kg to at her lowest 35kg, obsessive behaviours are a trait of autism and she later told me that she felt she was losing control of her life with the Autism diagnosis and the only thing she could control was the lack of eating, she also experimented with self harm (cutting).
At around 12 1/2 she was hospitalised, this was after almost begging the GP and the Child Mental health services to help, which they didn't really, we managed to convince the GP to do some urgent blood tests and the results were so low she was admitted.
She was at this point finally medicated for the ADHD symptoms and depression, initially sertraline which wasn't ideal (and her coming off it again was awful) and she is now on Duloxetine which is not typically prescribed to children but it seems to be working
What followed was around 6 months of my daughter being in hospital including me having to get her sectioned under the Mental Health Act so the hospital could force feed her a liquid supplement because she completely refused to eat, she had to be restrained while she was fed through a nasal gastric tube. She was sectioned to a General hospital children's ward, she was very close to being moved to a proper mental health unit, indeed the process had started for her assessment and one morning I was sat at her bedside and she asked if she could drink the meal replacement drinks instead of having them pumped into her (this was the first changing point).
The medical staff agreed she could drink them under supervision to make sure she wasn't throwing them away, she did drink them fully, and by the time a consultant came from the mental health unit she was drinking the meal replacement drinks regularly and he saw it and said a mental health unit wasn't appropriate because she was complying with treatment.
Over the next 6 weeks she started to eat more normal food, she was still very had to manage and would examine the calories on everything before eating it but very slowly her appetite returned and she began to eat more. During this time I was trying to hold down a full time job, be a parent to her younger sister and be at the hospital dealing with a child still under section as her advocate, having meetings with medical professionals and consultants.
I managed to get her home leave after 6 weeks, first for an hour, then 4 hours, then an overnight a week, then I wrote a formal letter to the hospital board asking for a court hearing which is allowed under the mental health act to have the section removed, the hospital didn't want to go to court so they granted a weeks leave which covered my daughters 13th Birthday and she got to come home with the agreement I would take her back after a week for an assessment and we would have home visits to check on her.
On the day she went back to hospital there was a mix up over times, I thought we had to be back at 14:00 hours which was when the meeting was due, the ward were expecting us at 11:00, at 12:00 they phoned me to ask where we were and I replied we were sat in a Greek restaurant eating Gyros kebabs, the ward manager laughed and said that was a reasonable excuse and we walked back in at around 13:00.
At the 14:00 meeting the consultant was happy and she was formally discharged from the hospital. That was late June 2025.
After that was another 6 months of outpatient appointments with a dietician monitoring her weight and us recording a food diary for her, still some periods of hiding food and mental health appointments, home visits, medication reviews etc and 21 weeks of CBT therapy.
She is at this point still on medication which she seems to be ok with, at her recent parents evening a number of teachers commented you would never know she missed most of Year 8 in school and she is in the top few percent of her year now in year 9 overall. She is at a healthy weight and is no longer self harming, the marks from it are healing very well.
She is likely to have some involvement from the Child Mental Health Services until she is 18 because a GP cannot prescribe the medication she is on to a child but hopefully the most she will need now is 3 monthly medication reviews.
I'm not sure why I wrote all this down, if anyone does get to the end then well done but I think it's important people realise that it's not always about a lifetime of benefits or any other stereotype, Getting a diagnosis for Autism can help in some ways, it helps with understanding things but don't expect a massive support network to appear because it won't from School or anywhere else, unless things really deteriorate as they did in my families case and even now getting the school to do anything is a massive uphill battle.
It has helped me understand a lot about myself, I am not diagnosed with anything but as my Daughter and I are very similar it's fairly obvious now that I am probably Autistic too but of course 35-40 years ago no one believed these things exist, I can also see a lot of traits in my Dad who is 76 now, but again he has led a full life without any diagnosis.
As it happens I did look into if I could claim anything to help with the costs of living and after filling in hundreds of pages of forms i was basically told I earn too much money to be entitled to anything and that was before you put my wife's wages into the mix as well, not to mention the DWP also losing my passport in their process centre which was never found again.
Jamescrs said:
It has helped me understand a lot about myself, I am not diagnosed with anything but as my Daughter and I are very similar it's fairly obvious now that I am probably Autistic too but of course 35-40 years ago no one believed these things exist, I can also see a lot of traits in my Dad who is 76 now, but again he has led a full life without any diagnosis.
My own 10 year old Daughter has Autistic traits and Neurodevelopmental issues (as part of a larger health condition), it has been very hard work for 10 years adjusting our lives to the changes this has brought about which are still ongoing and will likely be so for most of her life. It does frustrate me when people say 'well we didn't have this in my day' etc, no s
t, there was lots you didn't have, it doesn't mean it's all make believe.The NHS gets a hell of a slating, but I really do wonder just how much worse things might have been without it.
The Rotrex Kid said:
Jamescrs said:
It has helped me understand a lot about myself, I am not diagnosed with anything but as my Daughter and I are very similar it's fairly obvious now that I am probably Autistic too but of course 35-40 years ago no one believed these things exist, I can also see a lot of traits in my Dad who is 76 now, but again he has led a full life without any diagnosis.
My own 10 year old Daughter has Autistic traits and Neurodevelopmental issues (as part of a larger health condition), it has been very hard work for 10 years adjusting our lives to the changes this has brought about which are still ongoing and will likely be so for most of her life. It does frustrate me when people say 'well we didn't have this in my day' etc, no s
t, there was lots you didn't have, it doesn't mean it's all make believe.The NHS gets a hell of a slating, but I really do wonder just how much worse things might have been without it.
I don't think I was a missed diagnosis case, but I do worry some kids get unnecessarily pigeon-holed and then, in a way, stigmatised by that process and lable. One kids poor diet and sleep regime is showing up as behavioural issues, and maybe another child is just naturally very energetic.
This is not, in any way, to say James's daughter did not, in fact need the diagnoses and help, at all, but rather that the issues kids have are sometimes complex and hard to unpick. Overall it's better they're now getting the help they need these days.
Jamescrs said:
Snip
Thank you for posting.Your daughter clearly has a very real need and the treatment provided seems to have gone someway to help. Thank you for posting.
Unfortunately, as I know from family experience, there are plenty out there with low level condition that are gaming the system and making it hard for those who have a real need.
My Great nephew occasionally comes out with an inappropriate comment. Yet his parents do not correct him because he gets upset. As mentioned, he has a diagnosis of being neuro divergent. His Mum is on benefits and gets extra for his condition.
I am concerned as to what he future may hold for my nephew. His parents are not making any attempt to establish with him what is right or wrong because he is ND. I cannot see him holding down a job.
Dog Biscuit said:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyd1l0lge8o
More than one million children in England were referred to mental health services last year, with anxiety the most common reason. Referrals have almost doubled since 2018-19, while suspected autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions have also risen sharply.
While it is only a feeling, I do wonder how much influence social media is having on all of this.
Are children s mental health problems genuinely increasing, are we simply recognising them better, are services now unable to cope?
Im nearly 53 and I've struggled with anxiety all my life - Looking back I had it when very young and went unrecognised for a long time.
It's a very real thing but I suspect the NP&E "hot take" on it will be different to the "Health Matters" take on it.More than one million children in England were referred to mental health services last year, with anxiety the most common reason. Referrals have almost doubled since 2018-19, while suspected autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions have also risen sharply.
While it is only a feeling, I do wonder how much influence social media is having on all of this.
Are children s mental health problems genuinely increasing, are we simply recognising them better, are services now unable to cope?
Im nearly 53 and I've struggled with anxiety all my life - Looking back I had it when very young and went unrecognised for a long time.
I suspect anyone who suffers from it or who reads/sees/has to deal with those who do will have a slightly different take on it from the "benefits init" cohort that I suspect will form the majority of the replies on a very real issue.
Slow.Patrol said:
Did we have a focus on mental health issues from WW2?
Kids in London and other cities were sent to live with strangers, Dads sent to fight and some never came home. Mental health was rarely discussed and if it was, it was done in whispers as mental health problems was considered a taboo thing.
Whilst I think awareness and discussion of mental health is a good thing, it does seem that a few use it as an excuse or a badge of honour. Especially if it gets more on benefits.
Moving kids away from home in WW2 was very quickly recognised as being incredibly unhealthy for kids mental health even back then. By 1942/43 evacuations largely stopped, and it was decided it was better for kids to remain or move back with their parents in cities than be removed from them and into the safer countryside. 2/3rds of kids taken to Scotland had returned home by 1943. Kids in London and other cities were sent to live with strangers, Dads sent to fight and some never came home. Mental health was rarely discussed and if it was, it was done in whispers as mental health problems was considered a taboo thing.
Whilst I think awareness and discussion of mental health is a good thing, it does seem that a few use it as an excuse or a badge of honour. Especially if it gets more on benefits.
So yes, there was an awareness of mental health issues in WW2. And even before that, shell shock/PTSD was recognised, if not well understood, in WW1.
Edited by Condi on Monday 29th June 09:08
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