To ask why there are so many kids with mental health problems?

Mainly that we're more aware of it. But some things may contribute: greater insecurity and uncertainty (economic and otherwise); later age of economic independence; the stress of Covid; the fact that social media makes it harder to escape from bullying.

"no one in my year went through ‘school refusal’ etc … what was the difference between then and now?"

School refusal happened when I was at school in the 80s but back then no one cared that anyone was missing school.

I'm in my 50s and when I was young anorexia was rife

There is no support anymore for MH so kids that could have had help early are being left to crisis point before help is offered.

And I agree with @worzel

Don't judge until you have lived a year in someone l
Else's shoes.

If I know now what I knew when mine were babies then I'd have done some things differently. Hindsight and ignorance are both wonderful and terrible things.

Yes. This is a big thing. It’s work ethic. But also realising there’s more to life than school. There’s a world out there where the bullshit of school doesn’t matter. That the crap we are expected to put up with at school doesn’t all transfer to work and life.

Do you think there's an element of learnt behaviour?
You and both your kids

Do you think there's an element of ignorance?
Just you?
@widowtwankywashroom

My DS is 16. We are currently navigating our way through a very tricky situation involving the police. Throughout all of this I am surprised how well he is coping with the relentlessness of it and we have only had one instance when it got on top of him and he cried.

Factors I think that help. He is an only child so gets 100% of our support. He has a very good social group and his mates are with him at all times. Social media has been absolutely vile but we talk about it. We talk to him regularly. We eat dinner together most evenings round the table. I worked part-time up until a couple of years ago so was able to be there around school.

Things that i believehave made a difference.

Parents that are together so no parental conflict/different parenting styles.
As a baby / toddler there were firm boundaries and he was told no.
His phone was restricted when younger and on a school night had to be left downstairs.
I still spot check his phone - he knows I do it as I still pay for it.
I know where he is through find my iPhone.
He is lucky enough to have a part time job - this keeps him busy, and also improves his social skills and teaches him the value of money.
Through lockdown he had a full timetable so continued to have structure.

Sometimes it is purely genetics - some children just cope better with what life has thrown at them. They have solid families, solid friendship groups and they just get on.

I never take his mental wellbeing for granted as our shit is still going on but I feel for all families when their children desperately need mental health support and it is not there.

Sorry for long post!

As a secondary school teacher with almost 30 years' experience:

• social media doesn't help. Kids don't have a "safe space" away from bullies
• a chronic lack of funding for specialist help in all areas - CAMHS, schools, NHS etc.
• school budgets being pared to the bone so no staff available to talk to as they are re-deployed into covering absences/lack of specialist teachers
• the cost of living crisis. Kids worry about their parents. This happened a lot in 2020 too
• the Ukraine war. Kids worry about "what if it happened here?"
• climate change. Look at how many turned out for the climate strikes.

I don't think it's just one of the above. I think it's an accumulation of some/many.

A variety of things have added to it- the internet and social media, kids having less social interactions in person as a result, screens taking over real life meet ups etc. Also junk food and poor diet doesn’t help.

However, I do believe that society has become over the top with diagnosing people with things and that children and teens aren’t taught resilience or made to understand that some emotions are totally normal and everyone feels them from time to time. So the child who is anxious about standing up in class and reading (which I hated as a kid), becomes a child who suffers from ‘anxiety’. A kid who is fidgety in class must have ADHD, a kid who is hormonal and has mood swings is depressed.
Over awareness is not always a good thing and a lot of parents use the label of mental health because it explains what they maybe feel deep down is a failure of parenting on their part and a label almost diminishes their responsibility.

@Sirzy indeed.

My grandfather was hugely fucked up by it - he wasn't a charmer to begin with but was much more abusive afterwards by all accounts. The family was suitably messed up by it all and you can see it in all the dynamics today.

My husband's grandfather survived the holocaust, which also fucked him sideways from what we've heard (unsurprisingly). His entire "family" is packed with messed-up people who have been no-contact with each other for decades - we have nothing to do with any of them either.

But no, apparently both of those men would be proof of the good old days

Thinking about it, I should add to my list up thread that we're still seeing intergenerational trauma from those wars.

See that’s where you are completely wrong, COVID did not effect everyone’s mental health at all, that is all media scare mongering.

To answer the question as someone who actually works in children’s mental health, the increase is due in part to, in no particular order, social media, poor parenting, parenting responses too COVID and lockdown and the instant gratification society that exists now.

While children and young people have always experienced MH difficulties the response in society now is inappropriate.
Just how many time have you heard people say “I’ve got anxiety” ? Well of course you have it’s a perfectly normal emotion.
Its like saying, I’ve got the sadness. Joe Public have become MH experts liking to diagnose and medicalise every possible normal reaction.

Online bullying is huge and relentless, just how many parents on here monitor their children’s phones on a regular basis, who are they chatting to and what is being said.
Young people do not have the brain development to make their own decisions in many case but so many parents have such strong opinions about their right to privacy and therefore have no idea what’s going on.

Ive said this many times in here, what specialist MH services consider significant issues and what parents/ Joe Public consider are generally very different. So it’s not always the case that derives are struggling it’s more the case that the distribution for the mild to moderate are more sparse depending on where you live.

Do you think there's an element of learnt behaviour?
You and both your kids?

Lack of freedom, lack of safe outdoor spaces, and lack of good judgement about safe spaces by parents (MN is generally staggeringly risk averse).

Children benefit hugely from (apparently) unsupervised outdoor play. Which is no surprise, because that's how little monkey and chimp babies grow up, and that's what we are, essentially.

But a combination of poor availability of safe outdoor spaces, poor parental latitude, and screentime indoors means that kids aren't getting that fundamental time outside in the early years that really stimulates healthy brain development and self-regulation.

OP, that's interesting that you are a nurse. What do you think of your colleagues who take time off with stress etc As you can see in the reports (FROM the NHS press office) and the ONS Mental health issues account for a huge number of days off work in the NHS?
Do you think some of your colleagues last resilience?

There is far more UPF eaten now than ten years ago, and there is far more poverty, and far more social media, and far less money spent on education, and far less social work, and far less on youth services, far less on drug services and far fewer good job prospects after school.

But yeah, otherwise, just the same as ten years ago.

It seems that some people like to trivialise certain manifestations of anxiety and depression. If it's not deemed 'bad' enough, a good proverbial kick up the arse should suffice. Why on earth do complete strangers think they can make judgments about these things? They have no idea what is going on in another person's head or, indeed, their life. A small cut needs to be treated or it could become infected and turn into something bigger and more serious. Why can we not see mental health problems in the same way? DS2 was diagnosed with OCD in October 2022. He is just starting CBT now after a huge delay. I look back at when he was diagnosed and think life was pretty good then - manageable, relatively normal - now it's a living nightmare because his problems have snowballed out of control in ways I never could have imagined.

I think we should always listen when someone says they are struggling, rather than compare their situation with victims of war or abuse and say they don't have it that bad in comparison. Other people's problems being worse does not negate yours, nor does it make them go away.

Exactly.

my Dad worked in one of the old asylums. He treated many men with “shell shock” the men sent to war very much did suffer afterwards. Understandably so!

Pretty sure many people had bad MH after both world wars but it was not diagnosed or discussed but people were encouraged to put up and shut up.

Same thing with physical I'll health.

I’m pretty sure there was shit food and social media 10 years ago.

I don’t think it’s more prevalent now, we just talk about it. Which is a good thing, for the most part.

I had depression all through my teens (in the 2000s) and didn’t realise this until I was trying to understand my childhood trauma some 15 years later. I think if I had been a teen now, I would have been able to recognise what I was going through as depression and perhaps sought help.

While I think there's something in resilience and stiff upper lip behaviour, I think it's reductive to say "people in the old days had to fight wars, what would they say about you!"

WW1 and WW2 were horribly traumatic and caused mass trauma that's still feeding down into the world today.

Men didn't just march off bravely without a second thought - there was no choice!

I agree with the thought though. I was in school through the early 00s and it was totally different. While social media wasn’t the same there was still lots of mobile usage, people texted all the time, used msn every day, used MySpace then Facebook so it wasn’t some digital black hole.
But there wasn’t this concept of constant mental illness in teens. No one skipped out on exams because of anxiety, no one in my year went through ‘school refusal’ etc … what was the difference between then and now? Are things so different or was it just treated differently then.
I don’t even know if covid was really to blame because I think the situation was largely the same 5 years ago.

Ahh, yes all those lads fighting in the war came out of it so well!

Being told to pull your socks is fine in some circumstances but obnoxious and dangerous in others!

Poverty is a massive cause. In the last 13 years people have got poorer and poorer.

Not having enough food to eat definitely fucks your mental health.