Tag Archives: children

82. Euripides Trousers …

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Bees. They just get on with it.

Up until recently being a teenager was not regarded as a mental disorder. After David Cameron urged us to hug a hoodie, teenage angst was virtually eradicated from the  diagnostic landscape.  But now, some people seem to want to regard teenagers not just as sad victims of poor trouser design, but as Patients.

Someone’s looked at the lyrics of The Kids are Alright by The Who and recognised that they really meant the opposite. The Times is running a campaign about children’s mental health. A lot of assertions are being made that children are unhappy, that they are living through unusually stressful times, that they are victims of the modern world.

Horrible articles are being written about teenagers, suggesting they are unfathomable monsters and the National Theatre is running Medea again. I’m sorry, but this children’s mental health campaign feels like a moral panic. Who is stoking it up, and why?

Somehow or another, ‘subjective well being’ has become confused with becoming mentally ill. I’m a hypochondriac, but does that really affect my chances of getting ill?

Here’s a test of your subjective well being, the one used by the Children’s Society, the people who gave us the christingle:

Here are five sentences about how you feel about your life as a whole. Please tick a box to say how much you agree with each of the sentences: My life is going well; My life is just right; I have a good life; I have what I want in life; The things in my life are excellent.

Subjective well-being is arguably a test of how smug and complacent people are. How would John Lennon have scored? How would we have wanted him to score?

Before we go any further, how desirable is it for everyone to think the things in their lives are excellent?

Children are apparently scoring worse in such studies since 2008. And UK children are being dragged down the international league table by girls’ concerns about their appearance. British girls are second last, only South Koreans scoring lower, despite their excellent android phones.

It’s election time, so Nick Clegg is using the present tense when he should be using the future subjunctive, which apparently exists in Spanish. He’s claiming that stuff is happening, like expanding children’s services, that just might happen one day but probably won’t. He is comparing children’s mental health services to cancer services. If doctors did that they’d be accused of an absurd fixation with the medical model.

Libby Purves, still top of my list for head of state once we become a republic, compared children’s mental un-health to cholera, though admits that there is ‘no single pump handle’ to sort out.

To Libby’s credit, she soon recognises the problem is not like cholera at all.  She blames children’s unhappiness on: divorce, drug use, exam anxiety, peer pressure, early sexualisation, information overload, loss of contact with nature, ubiquitous screens, TV, games consoles…

Just like our generation suffered so much from CDs and colour TV. Just like our parents generation was thrown into abject misery by antibiotics and Walt Disney.

And she goes on to suggest a list of practical solutions: a smartphone ban in schools, art classes, choirs, safe outdoor spaces, park keepers, bus conductors, beat coppers and finally, ‘volunteering and youth groups to be made fashionable and fun’.

No doubt Libby is on the right track in terms of placing the issue firmly in the Sociology Department. There’s a squeeze on social capital and no sign of quantitative easing. That’s not to say that useful modern inventions like apps and text messaging are deleterious to social capital – quite the reverse is true judging from the queues in Costa and Macdonalds.

Very soon, the children’s mental health campaign will have to contact Blur to see if they can borrow the slogan Modern Life is Rubbish. But remember, that album was released in 1993, which to the under 18’s is somewhere between Roman times and Wolf Hall. Modern life really was rubbish then, before graphical user interfaces and flat screens. And it was probably rubbish in 1893, the year when the US Supreme Court declared the tomato officially to be a vegetable.

And isn’t the rest of The Times newspaper filled with all the stuff that Libby regards as a cholera fountain? The cholera in question being market-driven, intra-sexual competition. There’s a lot of stuff about girls who hate themselves and almost nothing about bus conductors or park keepers. In the fashion section all the items are unfeasibly expensive apart from one token item from Primark. Any article about anything whatsoever, such as which is the best digital tyre pressure device, will be accompanied by a picture of a thin female person, probably one of the tiny girls employed to make the DFS sofas look massive. If Libby finds that pump handle she ought sort out some of her co-workers with it.

People have been casting aspersions on younger generations throughout history. This is perhaps the first time that teenagers are being castigated by being labelled mentally unhealthy. It’s a change from being considered morally deficient or stupid, but just as fatuous.

Mostly, there is no sense in medicalising the problems children face. There are no specific treatments or therapies that will help them and no army of skilled professionals waiting for Clegg to deploy them.

Luckily, there is little evidence that youngsters are any more mentally unhealthy than any other age group. Mental illness, like most other illnesses, gets more likely when people get older, like rust on cars. Children don’t get mentally ill in the same way as adults, not very often anyway. Although it is unbelievably awful when a suicide occurs in a young person, teenage girls’ rates of suicide are three time lower than middle aged women and twenty times lower than middle aged men.

People are not growing huge thumbs as a result of texting or walking into traffic because of ear phones. A teacher asked me recently whether schools should have mindfulness programs. But surely, a school is a mindfulness program?

Attempts are being made to impose guilt on schools and companies for being competitive, with the aim of selling them mental health services to patch up any bruised egos. The Times is doing something similar within its internally contradicted hand-wringing departments of greed and anti-greed. Thankfully our children our savvy enough not to join the stampede down to CAMHS.

Anyway, they can’t run in those trousers.

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55. Saving the early intervention service, till later.

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An uneasy meeting at a fancy dress party.

It’s official. Children cost too much. Childcare costs more than a mortgage. If you have children they might stop you going to work, and they eat a lot too. Shouldn’t people be told this sooner? Worse than that, children don’t come with any kind of guarantee, and more of them seem to be going wrong. If Toyota had made them there’d be a recall. And soon a Commons Committee on young people’s mental health will start its proceedings.

Though there are rumours that mental health problems among teenagers have increased, there has not been a proper survey since 2004, when the world was very different. It’s hard to believe, but they didn’t even have Instagram in those days, let alone Whatsapp. People wore top hats and tail coats and travelled by horse, particularly the women.

There are lots of theoretical reasons why it’s got worse to be a teenager. Legal highs are widely available, the Harry Potter series came to an end, and no-one is far enough beyond suspicion to take over hosting Jim’ll Fix It, unless Desmond Tutu can be persuaded. Large numbers of youngsters have been sent to remote labour camps, or universities as they are now known. Employment opportunities as footballers and TV presenters, the only jobs worth having, have largely dried up.

Sadly, if a generation of teenagers became psychotic or depressed, no-one would really notice. Part of the blame belongs to British psychiatry and its strange tradition of age discrimination. For some reason we have different specialists for young, adult and older people, as though they were totally different forms of life – like eggs, caterpillars and butterflies respectively.

There’s a kind of reason for that, in that young people don’t really get the same kind of mental illnesses as adults. Psychotic conditions are very rare in children, or so we thought. ‘Early intervention’ services were an attempt to plug the gap, at least for older teenagers who seemed to be showing signs of schizophrenia. Early intervention was a laudable aspiration, but didn’t get much beyond that, since there was no litmus test for psychosis. The services were overwhelmed to an extent, by the numbers of children with emotional disorders, such as so-called ‘borderline’ personality; problems that,in a sense, flow from children being treated as commodities instead of people.

To cut a long story short, another tonne of anti-psychotics wended its way to the sewerage system, some of it via people. The early intervention services have been pruned back rather savagely, before they had a chance to flower. Doubtless the Commons Health Committee will come to regret this. In the meantime, services for teenagers are largely restricted to a skateboard area and free condoms at the library, for those who are brave enough.

When the large mental hospitals were closed down, some people warned that community services would be much easier to cut. It’s to do with visibility. Some of the asylum hospitals were the size of aircraft carriers; quite likely some of them had their own Harrier Squadron. They certainly had farms, ballrooms and cricket pitches. Everyone has noticed they’ve gone.

The coalition government has been quite tough on aircraft carriers, and luckily there won’t be one to send to the Crimea. But having a carrier with no aircraft to go on top is a major embarrassment. It’s like a Christmas cake without the marzipan, let alone the little decorative church and snowman. Similarly, having a hospital full of closed wards looks a bit wasteful. But if a care assistant only comes half as often, for half as long, or doesn’t visit at all, no-one really notices.

And if your psychotherapist turns out to have one years training at a community college, rather than the 25 year apprenticeship in Vienna and the multiple doctorates you’d expected, it’s hardly a big deal to anyone. Low tech services have a soft underbelly, as do many of the people who work in them – too much driving about eating petrol station sandwiches.

As the community mental health services are scythed back, we hear only a few muffled squawks from politicians. Nick Clegg (deputy prime minister and Britain’s answer to Al Gore) popped up in January, stating that mental health must be given parity with physical health. ‘We have got to take this out of the shadows’, he said. And we can expect a further survey on teenagers’ mental health, probably conducted by social media. But does the government have any coherent plan for teenagers, or are they considered, as a Bond villain might say, ‘expendable’? After all, they don’t vote and they don’t pay much tax. As a species, humans have a reasonable life expectancy at birth, which is a miracle, considering we ride bicycles, but perhaps this is set to change. It’s a bit ominous that youngsters are now being told that world war one was a useful outing.

With the demise of early intervention teams, there should be a move for adult and child psychiatrists to work together more closely, but I see no signs of this. They just drive a totally different kind of Audi.

During vacations I always got a child psychiatrist to cover my work, which he did brilliantly. I doubt whether I’d fare so well with his patients, unless he wanted half of them put on depot injections, and a tonne of complaint letters from parents. And I’m not sure if they still have sandpits to play in, so I wouldn’t know whether to bring my own bucket and spade.

Maybe a reverse takeover is in order, where children’s services take over and everyone is regarded as a child. This is perhaps the only way that children can get treated equitably. The danger is Ofsted staging a coup and taking over the government. And everyone would have to have a CRB check, just to meet anyone else at all. Treating everyone like children has worked well in lots of countries – you know who you are, nanny states.  Perhaps Nick Clegg could consider this. Otherwise, teenagers, like Hank B Marvin, are just going to have to ‘stay in the shadows’.