The mental health of young people
Moral Maze
BBC
4.4 • 623 Ratings
🗓️ 7 February 2019
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
By many measures the UK is better than it was in the 1950s, but is it a better place in which to be young? Teenagers are more likely to be depressed today than they were during the Great Depression. Self-harm and suicide are on the rise. What’s going on? Surely, it can’t just be the internet, whether we welcome it for giving young people freedom they never had before, or demonise social media for confronting young people, hour by hour, with evidence of their own inadequacy. Research suggests that children and teenagers are spending less time face-to-face with their friends. Parents used to send their kids out to play in the park; now that’s exposing them to ‘stranger danger’. Young people can go off the rails because of family breakdown, and parents can struggle to cope if there is a lack support from the extended family or the wider community. We remember that older generations have always been quicker to condemn young people than to praise them. How far should we feel collectively responsible for the mental health of young people? Is it time to intervene through government regulation and education policy to protect teenagers? If the politicians, teachers and doctors take increasing responsibility, do they risk undermining parents as authority figures? We worry about teenagers’ self-esteem, but are we in danger of wrapping them in cotton wool, and reducing their resilience? Are we over-medicalising the issue, diagnosing serious mental health problems where once we saw only the stresses and uncertainties of adolescence? In this ‘Children’s Mental Health Week’, how should we do the right thing by our children?
Producer: Dan Tierney
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a programme from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:04.1 | Good evening. It's a neat but terribly worrying paradox. |
| 0:07.6 | Now, children are the most physically safe but mentally fragile generation in history. |
| 0:12.8 | Tragic individual cases make headlines, but a series of surveys in recent weeks, a barrage of statistics, |
| 0:18.8 | show that they're not exceptions. |
| 0:20.8 | We already knew from an |
| 0:21.8 | OECD report that British children were the unhappiest in the Western world. A UGov poll published this |
| 0:27.5 | week for the Prince's Trust suggested the number of youngsters that think life simply isn't worth living |
| 0:33.1 | has doubled in a decade to one in five. Teenage suicides reflect that. They've nearly doubled over the same period, |
| 0:41.2 | as has the number of girls being treated by the NHS for self-harming. Boys now, too. |
| 0:46.6 | Three children in every class, we're told, have a diagnosable mental disorder, and it's getting worse every year. |
| 0:53.1 | So what's wrong with our children? It can't just be |
| 0:55.5 | the internet. Are we failing to look after them? Or are we protecting them too much? The snowflake |
| 1:01.5 | generation shielded from the rough edges of life by helicopter parents and teachers tiptoeing |
| 1:07.0 | around their sensitivities. Are the snowflakes melting? It's children's mental health |
| 1:12.2 | week, but is that part of the problem? Are we medicalising the normal stresses of adolescence |
| 1:16.7 | and making them worse? Or is it more complicated? A toxic mix of anxieties about identity, |
| 1:23.2 | ill-defined boundaries, educational pressures? What's wrong with our, kids, and who should do what about it? |
| 1:29.7 | That's our moral maize tonight. |
| 1:31.0 | The panel, Claire Fox from the Academy of Ideas, Anne McElvoy, senior editor at The Economist, |
| 1:35.9 | the chief executive of the RSA, Matthew Taylor, and the historian Tim Stanley. |
| 1:40.6 | Claire Fox, you've pronounced views on this, I know. |
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