A lot of young people “don’t have any access to mental health services until they’d hit crisis point” (Photo: WikipediaCommons)
Two decades ago young people had the best mental health of any age group in Britain. Today the reverse is true.
Now, 34 percent of people aged between 18 and 24 years old report symptoms of “common mental disorders”, such as anxiety or depression. This figure rises to 41 percent among young women.
So it’s not an exaggeration to talk of a crisis in mental health affecting young people. Nor is the crisis confined to older teenagers and young adults.
Mental health referrals for children and young people in England have been rising since before the pandemic. They increased from 340,000 in 2017-18 to 540,000 in 2019-20.
Last year, the number of children and young people with active referrals soared to 949,000.
A report by the Centre for Young Lives revealed that, as of 2024, 32,000 children had been waiting more than two years to be seen by mental health services.
It also found that most children were not directed to any form of interim support for self-harm and suicide prevention while they waited.
The report showed that after years of funding cuts, thresholds for intervention are so high that even suicidal children are frequently turned away from the services they need.
So what lies behind this crisis?
The hard right wants us to believe that it’s a symptom of a “snowflake generation” unable or unwilling to handle the stresses of everyday life.
And many centrist politicians, such as Labour’s former work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall, have tailed them.
She responded to the huge rise in unemployment among young people in recent years by claiming that too many benefit claimants were “taking the Mickey”.
A report published in July of this year shows such arguments to be without foundation.
Commissioned by the Youth Futures Foundation and conducted by academics from Manchester University and UCL, it is the most comprehensive research into this crisis to date.
Addressing the “snowflake” argument, the authors argue that “this research provides evidence that the increase of young people with a mental health problem (or decline in young people’s mental health) is real”.
It’s “not merely a result of increased symptom recognition, greater awareness, overdiagnosis or reduced resilience”, the report argues.
“Our analysis points to a genuine rise in mental distress among young people.”
Among the key factors contributing to that rise, they identify financial insecurity—including short-term job contracts, as well as the inability to find satisfying work were a key factor.
Reduced access to non-clinical services was a key factor, and sleep disturbance was also found to make a significant impact.
However, they say social media use makes only a “small impact”. The reference to non-clinical services is important.
Children and young people’s services, alongside other community services such as libraries and community centres, have been amongst the main victims of austerity policies since 2010. So the report correctly stresses the importance of young people’s support hubs for their mental health.
However, as Socialist Worker reported recently, many of these hubs are now facing closure as the result of the latest cuts.
The truth is that protecting the mental health of children and young people—and improving the services on offer to them—will require the kind of fightback against disability cuts that we saw earlier this year. Then, massive opposition forced the government into a humiliating retreat.
But we need to go further than fighting for services. The dominant psychiatric model would have us believe that what it calls “mental disorders” are caused by dysfunctional brains. And the response to this anomaly is usually some form of medication.
By contrast, what the Youth Futures Foundation report and similar research show and what I argue in my book, is that the roots of mental distress lie not in people’s brains but in the conditions created by a capitalist society.
And, as millions of young people across Africa and Asia are currently showing in the so-called Gen Z protests, the most effective response to that rotten system is not Prozac, but revolution.
‘Accessing services was made to feel like an audition’
Anna, from Cumbria
Anna was struggling with her mental health from around 12 years old and she was referred to Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS). It diagnosed her with anxiety and depression and later, an eating disorder.
“CAMHS significantly worsened my mental health,” she told Socialist Worker. “I think it was massively underfunded.
“I remember when I was 15 years old, I had tried to kill myself and they had no beds in the adolescent mental health unit. They were annoyed at me because they didn’t know what to do with me.”
Anna said, “CAMHS therapists told me that I couldn’t be depressed because I was wearing makeup and that I was not skinny enough to be anorexic.
“That certainly made my eating disorder a lot worse because I felt like, oh, this is a competition now. I need to eat even less, because then they’ll believe me.”
Services did not improve after she turned 18 years old. “The mental health services that I accessed into my adulthood were a mixed bag, but they felt like an audition,” she said.
“I got diagnosed with borderline personality disorder when I was 19. Whenever I got referred to mental health services, they saw my diagnosis and said, ‘Oh, we don’t treat that. That’s too difficult. You’re too difficult.’”
Anna thought that we need to challenge embedded attitudes in mental health services. “I think there’s a lot wrong, especially the way they treat women and girls,” she said.
“They often refer to your symptoms as a ‘phase,’ or they say this is ‘hormonal,’ or that this is ‘just part of being a woman.’ I’ve heard that phrase quite a few times.”
There needs to be a big increase in funding for services, but Anna argued it will take a more fundamental change in society to improve young people’s mental health.
“There are other factors,” she said. “The conditions that we live in just create more ill health. I was in group therapy until last year and the problems that people were bringing up, a lot of them would be helped if they had secure housing.”
‘Cuts can mean sitting around doing nothing for a whole week. That doesn’t help when you’re on an acute psych ward’
Anya, London
Anya waited for more than a year for an initial appointment when she first sought help for her mental health problems aged 14 years old.
“Getting into therapy takes way longer than getting an initial appointment. I was 17 by the time I was seen,” she told Socialist Worker.
“When I first went in, they gave me a working diagnosis of ADHD, autism, then borderline personality disorder and then OCD traits.
“And every time I went back, they would change the diagnosis. That happens to a lot of people, but particularly to women, especially when they are young.”
The long wait for treatment made her situation worse, said Anya, who is now 22 years old and has spent time on mental health wards.
“I’ve had experiences when I’m under section (when the state deems you should be detained under the Mental Health Act) when, because of staff cuts, they’ve had no occupational therapy because they don’t have a therapist in the building.
“That means the whole week you don’t have any therapy, except for our one ward round, which is for about 30 minutes on a Monday.
“So we’re all sat around doing nothing, which doesn’t help when you’re on an acute psych ward.”
Anya explained that mental health services often have an approach that blames individuals for their own problems. “The model they have doesn’t actually help,” she said.
“They put a lot of it on you. They’re like, well, you can’t get better if you don’t want to.”
‘A lot of young people come into hospital having had no access to mental health services until they’d hit crisis point’
Erica, mental health worker, north west England
Erica works in schools as part of a mental health early intervention programme. She told Socialist Worker that her own experiences of poor care as a young person are part of what motivates her.
“I struggled with my mental health and I got no support from CAMHS. It was only when I turned 18 did that change. And then, the only support I was offered was medication,” she said.
“It shouldn’t be like that, because you’re treating the symptoms, you’re not treating the cause.
“If we had readily available mental health support for young people, it could stop the escalation. And people might not have to grow into adults that struggle with their mental health without support.”
Before working on mental health in schools, Erica was based in hospitals. “I saw a lot of young people come into hospital that hadn’t had any access to mental health services until they’d hit crisis point,” she said.
“And being admitted to hospital just made things worse for them. They were traumatised and it was just unnecessary.
“We were so underfunded and understaffed that it was dangerous to even work there.
“Then you think about these poor young people who have been struggling, not getting any help, and then reaching crisis point and been put into hospitals which are unsafe. How is that fair?”
Erica said poor care also increases the danger of suicide and self-harm. “Everyone who starts working in mental health wants to help people. They want to be able to do therapeutic things,” she said.
“When you physically can’t do that and you can’t even effectively manage risk, it’s like, what are we doing for these young people?
“We’ve brought them into hospital, which is traumatising in itself, and then we can’t even treat them.”
There needs to be a massive increase in funding for mental healthcare, explained Erica. And, she said she knows exactly where it should go. “Early intervention. 100 percent,” she said firmly.
“That could stop the escalation. It could stop the amount of young people who later develop unhealthy coping mechanisms, like self-harm. We could break that cycle.”
Thousands of residents in London have been without water for months
The climate crisis is impossible to ignore
The human cost of the heatwaves are higher than the temperature
Divide and rule was used to undermine struggle
