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

There doesn’t always have to be a reason. DS made his first attempt to end his life when he was 12. He didn’t even have a phone at that point so no access to social media. He had two loving parents, a nice home, no money worries, a close wider family. He had plenty of friends and was doing well at school but he still felt his life wasn’t worth living.

He’s in his early 20’s now and still struggles massively with episodes of depression.

It's just different for different people.

Could be
Trauma
Bad parenting
Overworked and stressed parents
Too much screen time
Not enough outdoor time
Limited time to explore, play and get dirty
No support for kids struggling at school (even parents can be looked down on if they help their kids by doing extra work)
Unhealthy food
Absence of secure boundaries and expectations (so many kids don't do any chores)

@Spottymushroom That is a lovely long list and might well be the reason for the increase, but not a single one applies to my DD.

What I hate about these threads is the feeling that other people will look at my DD and judge her anxiety and depression without consideration there may be deep seated issues in her background. Luckily we have supportive friends and family.

I was a teen with mental health issues so it's not new. I think awareness is more widespread. That coupled with lockdowns meant that a lot of (now) teens missed out on a hell of a lot of the socialisation and mixing with their peers that usually goes into building of characters and figuring out who you are as a person which at least in my opinion would absolutely take it's toll on someone's mental health. The last few years has had a shit tonne of out of the ordinary shit going on

Our desire to over medicalise every normal human emotion and want a medication as a quick fix.

There's a strong element of it being not seen as much in the old days. We now get constantly bombarded with information about mental health and it makes even healthy teenagers question themselves (I have teens, both emotionally resilient and with no MH issues, but both aware of mental health in a way I wasn't at their age). Same at work, there's a big emphasis on it now. So if you don't have mental health problems yourself it feels much more visible than it did in the past.

There will be different triggers for different people, some will have been badly affected by lockdown, some by social media, some by poverty, some by abuse or neglect or traumatic experiences. It's not just one thing and some people can cope with some things that will tip other people over the edge.

It’s always been around but social media and everyone having mobile phones has definitely amplified it.
In the 80s/90s loads of girls had eating disorders and were fainting all over the shop, then it was depression and self harm, then everyone that watched Zoella had ‘anxiety’. Now it’s confused, easy influenced teens identifying as poly crescent moon non binary asexuals or whatever. Teens are ridiculously impressionable.

Totally unqualified but I think it’s a combination of:

• young brains being influenced by internet/video/tv which is shortening attention spans and creating a lack of ability to be bored
• children on the whole not being taught resilience (rewards for participating, being made to feel like they are good at everything)
• lack of independence as children are kept more ‘safe’
• social media and the constant presence of perfect influencers
• increased exam pressures at earlier ages
• everything being a big deal - huge birthday parties, y6 proms etc … things are built up and it creates a pressure for everything to be just so
• presence of ultra processed foods
• better diagnosis and greater awareness

And none of this is the fault of parents, it’s wider societal and environmental and almost impossible to opt out of and shelter children from but I think society is general quite harmful to the impressionable nowadays and children are the most impressionable of us all.

Im not even saying these things are wrong but I think they all work together to create a less than ideal environment.

Very easy to judge and ask passive aggressive questions posing as being “truly baffled.”when your own child is so small. Come back when they are a teenager with whatever mad shit will be in social media then. Get back to me when they have been sitting at home for almost 2 years during Covid, not seeing friends, not going to school, not socialising, not graduating, trying but struggling to learn remotely, missing rites of passage and lots of “firsts” due to a pandemic nobody understood and most people were terrified of. Pressured to get vaccinations, watching love ones die, wearing masks when they eventually went back to school where they couldn’t breathe, got screamed at if they tried to remove them and couldn’t see their teachers faces nor their friends.
Get back to me when they get bullied on social media, when they try to emulate impossible filtered beauty and figures. Get back to me when they have hidden autism that they have tried to mask for years but it is now impossible. Get back to me when they see the news or watch TikToks about the atrocities of the world and start obsessing and worrying about them.
Get back to me when they are deliberately ostracised by a friend group because they are not cool enough, thin enough or popular enough. Get back to me when they trawl the pro ana sites online looking for “thinspiration” and stop eating.
I have 4 kids. 3 of them sailed through. covid and one didn’t. It broke her. She missed out on crucial parts of growing up, she struggled with remote learning and she absolutely withered without social interaction. I have brought her for help and the psychologists and psychiatrists have all said that the pandemic brought about a pandemic in itself of mental health issues in young people and that paired with social media pressure and all that brings is a melting pot for acute mental health issues in teenagers and they have waiting lists of six months plus yo even be seen (private).
It’s very easy to question teenage mental health and to be honest, you being a teenager 10 years ago means jack shit because the world has changed beyond recognition in that time especially for young people.
You honestly have no clue. You are 29 with a baby. It’s all ahead of you and you can be the best mother in the world with the best boundaries and resilience training and it can still go terribly wrong. Remember that.

It's not a new phenomenon, I had severe mental health issues as a teen (a very long time ago now) as did a few of my friends but due to the lack of social media it wasn't talked about.

I think the prominence has a lot to do with the use of social media, lockdown, more pressure being put on teens and lack of appropriate funding to deal with mental health etc. but it's not new.

I'm not sure parenting is better or worse than in previous generations. My parents were great but were very, very hands off.

Social media/peer pressure
Parents who are too busy with their own lives to parent
Lack of boundaries and consistent routine
Not enough sleep
Poor diet
Not enough exercise
Realising that everyone gets worried/anxious and you don't need a label because of it - it's normal. That's all life is to a degree, worrying about something or other.

I feel very lucky to have raised 3 fairly resilient young adults, but we had a DC with ADHD and therefore routine/structure/consistency was non negotiable. And truthfully there were times when we felt that's all our life was and it was miserable. We had rules about screen times, kids went to bed with books/audio books and no TV/screens after tea. Bedtime routine was uber strict, we went on a long walk everyday with the dog and we ate a very strict diet of no junk food (additives sent them crazy). I feel bloody exhausted coming through the other side of it, but parenting is and should be hard work.

This absolutely. The absolute medicalisation of every emotion and derision and having a go at (as evidenced by this thread) of anyone who dares suggest, 'hold up, a lot of this is normal for teens'.

Agree with social media, bloggers (the majority) its not real life but most importantly it doesn't really hold any depth.

I think there's a fine line between making something a stigma and just casually throwing round the words "anxiety" and mental health.

90s kid here and even from the TV shows we watched they had a lot more depth and things were not instant we had to wait.

Now everything is at a click of a button.

Disrupted, not structured.

I think genetics has a part to play. I was under the care of the mental health services from the age of 13. I was diagnosed with ADHD at 39, and I suspect if this was done when I was a child, I could have avoided a lot of the accompanied mental health problems.
But mental illness is rife in my family. All the way down my maternal grandmother's line and my paternal grandfather's too. My parents, their siblings, the respective grand parents, and their siblings. All have/had mental health illness.
Both of my son's are autistic, and both showed signs of declining mental health during the pandemic when their routine was structured.

There are so many factors we can’t narrow it down to one reason. I work in teenage mental health.

• social media. It’s awful and I think it should be banned for anyone under the age of 18. The doom scrolling of seeing everything perfect and feeling pressure to live their ‘best lives’ constantly.
• normal teenage arguments get heightened because there is no break from it. It gets put on WhatsApp, tik tok, Snapchat, etc. By the next morning it’s huge.
• language we use - it’s normal to feel sad or scared/nervous of things. They are straight away labelled depression, anxiety and children are using language of mental health. I see a huge range of children and yes there are lots with mental health but there is also a lot who are just experiencing normal human emotions.
• parents - we aren’t teaching our children any resilience. Parents are constantly arguing with schools about detentions and saying their child will not do it. Children need boundaries to make them feel safe and some parents aren’t giving them that anymore.
• parents aren’t allowing children to feel bored (I was also guilty of this). All the afternoon clubs, weekend activities, summer clubs, etc. children then don’t understand the feeling of being bored and think it’s something else.
• cost of living - not just about having the latest phone or trainers. The children I talk to who are so worried about money. It’s not the parents fault at all but we need to realise how much it is troubling kids.
• transgender ideology- I will get blasted for this but I don’t care. Teenage years are so complex anyway with out this. Bodies are changing and they feel uncomfortable with this. Again it all ties into resilience and social media. They are being fed that if they feel uncomfortable in their body, they must be the wrong gender.
• add on to this that girls and boys arguing that they want single sex toilets and safe spaces and they are labelled transphobic - again it’s all over social media.
• they are so scared to voice an opinion out of the fashion without being bullied.

Lockdown certainly.

But also loss of any expectation of having a good job and a home.

Social media
Being indoors too much
Academic expectation with children pushed in to higher education that are not really suitable for that environment, I worked in HE for 27 years
Parents wanting to be friends with their children, no boundaries
Highly processed food
Lockdown
Parents ignoring their children and being on SM themselves. Saw a toddler being ignored while its parents were scrolling on phones whilst sat on a beautiful marina having lunch.
Drug taking, it’s always existed but seems more socially acceptable. Some serious MH issues can develop due to weed smoking

@dayslikethese1 very true about much less face to face interaction. My DS was in a football team and then cadets. So all good there. He did game, I also game and not anti gaming at all but it was restricted time wise. I have gamed with skim youngsters online who are on all the time and have zero life outside gaming, feeds in to incel culture.

There is more pressure to pass GCSEs now than in the past. There just aren't the number of jobs that don't require qualifications that there used to be.
Even vocational qualifications at college have changed to have more emphasis on exams over regular assignments.

The introduction of numbered grades and grade 9s adds to this for higher ability children too. No one needs 9s, they're just extra pressure on perfectionist children.

Everyone has a degree of resilience, until they are overloaded and break.

It isn't just one thing, it's a load building up.

Because this generation is absolutely obsessed with labels. When I was in school 20+ years ago people had rough patches and struggles but the way they were expected to deal with them is very different to what we expect today. I also don’t think people realise the feeling depressed and anxious is an entirely normal feeling and is not the same as having anxiety and depression.

On the one hand it’s great that MH issues are talked about and understood more. OTOH O feel the pendulum was swung too far and there is a bit of a snowflake problem going on

The far bigger issue is parents not backing up schools, and I don't mean for minor infringements but for quite major things. Lots of children know they can get away with a fair amount because they recognise the limitations of school punishments and aren't getting in trouble at home for it either. Even the proper rebels when I was at school would fear being sent to the headmaster and their parents being phoned.

Totally agree. Parenting has gone downhill, not strict enough snd they’re too afraid to say no to their kids.