Let's not damage children's mental health in 2023
Wishing them (and you) a happy new year!
For a society so apparently concerned with children’s wellbeing and mental health, we’ve done a lot of damage to it of late.
As 2022 rapidly draws to a close and we begin to get some perspective on the awful events of the preceding two years, here are my thoughts on what we have learned and what we should do (or, more to the point, not do) in 2023.
The Department of Education published a research report The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescent mental health in March this year. It reported ‘increased adolescent depressive symptoms and decreased life satisfaction’ resulting from the pandemic.
But the report also notes that the pandemic was only the latest blow, with around 14-17% 11-19 year olds in England meeting International Classification of Disease (ICD-10) diagnostic criteria for at least one mental disorder, before anybody had heard of the virus.
This, the authors say, supports the view that while there is little reliable research in this area, child and adolescent mental health was already a serious cause for concern.
Indeed, the report was published just a month on from the Department’s own rather damning State of the Nation report. Stating the obvious, if a little too late, it found ‘pupils with higher wellbeing ratings were more likely to have regularly attended school’ whereas ‘drops in wellbeing occurred … in February 2021, when schools were closed to the majority of pupils’. That obesity rates also ‘increased substantially between 2019/20 and 2020/21’ suggests the damage done to children’s health was wider, so to speak. Thankfully children’s relationships with their friends were beginning to show ‘signs of recovery’ with the return to school.
While not much has come of it, the government can’t be accused of ignoring the issue. In the education sector alone, efforts to tackle it mean that pupils and students are increasingly being treated more as mental health patients - their minds not so much filled as examined.
A ‘whole school’ (or college) approach to mental health and wellbeing is encouraged, as is the nomination and training of mental health leads. Mental Health Support Teams (MHSTs) are being attached to schools, and mandatory relationships, health and sex education (RSHE) includes a module on mental wellbeing.
And yet despite a flood of initiatives - in schools, colleges and universities too - before and since the calamitous closure of schools, each of them intended to prevent or address the nation’s children’s mental health problems; as any parent trying to access them knows only too well, demand only seems to grow as services continue to struggle.
As I’ve argued before, there is a seeming confusion of overlapping needs with multiple causes, combined with cultural shifts, campaigns and policy drivers, to encourage greater levels of diagnosis and identification with narratives around wellbeing, not least when it comes to children’s mental health.
There is also, as I’ve suggested before, a real problem with over-intervention in family life effectively decommissioning parents as authorities in their own children’s lives. For instance, with regards parents’ decision-making about their children’s access to the internet - in the name of protecting them from ‘online abuse’.
And with regards not just the often made link between mental health problems in children and domestic abuse, but with the potential for less serious parental conflict to impact on children’s wellbeing too. In both cases widening the scope for state involvement in every day family life on emotive if shaky grounds.
How about in 2023, instead of talking relentlessly about our mental health and wellbeing, while damaging it in practice, whatever the merits of the initiatives pursued with affected young people, we make doubly sure not to do anything guaranteed to make it a whole lot worse.
Happy New Year!