Teen mental health in the 80s and 90s

[GladysGeorgina]

I work as a pastoral and safeguarding lead in a high school. I was at high school myself in the mid eighties and very early 90s.
I work with so many students who are struggling with their mental health. I also have personal experience with my teenage dc. The AMA thread last night from a school housemistress talked about the wave of mh issues within her school, particularly self harm.
I look back to my time in high school and I just wasn’t aware of peers experiencing mh issues. It just wasn’t something we talked about or knew anything about. I remember one girl who used to have what I now know to be probably panic attacks and she was collected from school when this happened.
I’m not naive enough to think teens at this time didn’t experience mh problems but what happened to these children? Were there really fewer issues like I remember? School refusal also wasn’t something I remember happening.
I guess what I’m asking is am I remembering correctly? Did anyone work in a high school at this time and can remember what teen mh was generally like? Did anyone experience mh issues during this period and what was it like for you?
I feel like I face such alot of significant need at school and it troubles me. Was the need just “hidden” in the 80s and 90s or have things really got so much worse for our young people? I’m not a journalist or reporter by the way. Genuinely trying to make some kind of sense of what I see every working day.

I was at high school in the 90s. One of my friends had regular "panic attacks" and would go and sit in the school office with a friend to keep her company until she got herself together. Sometimes she'd be given a paper bag to breathe into, because that was supposed to help. She never had counselling or any kind of official help, but we'd all keep an eye on her and knew when she wasn't feeling too good. The anxiety calmed down when she left school and she's ok now.

Another friend took an overdose at school, was taken to hospital and came back the following week. There was a kind teacher who told my friend to come and speak to her any time she wanted (friend didn't want to in case this teacher told the other teachers), but there was no other support. This friend is ok too now, but it took many years to get there.

I hope there is more support now.

My dbro had his first psychotic episode in the early 90s (later diagnosed with schizophrenia) and I had terrible social anxiety. Dbro was supported by the nhs (sectioned etc) but I had to help myself other than one session with a psychiatrist my mum paid for who was treating my brother. I was so anxious about talking to him it was a complete waste of time. I also was on several diets despite being slim and a few of us were involved in competitive under eating. I hated my body. I also suffered from terrible Christian guilt. I have several friends who I supported through their parents being abusive / alcoholics. So it was definitely bad then too but we just didn’t know what to do about it and talked to each other.

You’re right @Yippitydoodah nothing is changed or fixed. I have personally found this discussion useful in at least trying to understand what might be going on at the moment and putting the experiences of today’s teens in context with previous generations. It’s important for me to try to make some sort of sense of what I’m seeing every day.

I was at school late 80s early 90s - rampant anorexia and unsupported angry bereaved kids (parents) who 'acted out' as a result.

I went to a girls’ grammar school in the 90s, and we had our share of teens who self-harmed, who were anorexic, who had depression, who tried to commit suicide etc. But it was only one or two girls in each year. I’m sure there would have been more if we’d had social media.

There will always be teens with MH issues, it’s that time of life really - hormones, friendships, relationships, puberty, exams. It’s whether the baseline is an ‘acceptable number’ and not exacerbated by external factors (like social media, gender identity etc) that is what needs to be targeted in my view. That and not encouraging people to dwell on MH too much and learn to work through normal negative feelings.

I was at school in the 90s. I remember one girl had anorexia, that was it for my school. And two who self harmed at university.

Everyone I knew had either a stay at home mum, or a mum home by 3pm, providing constant support and therapy. Now, almost no child I know has that.

Also, current teens were given uncontrolled access to social media for years even though its been proved over and over that facebook etc causes depression.

Plus, parenting is unfashionable. My Fb feed is full of ‘hilarious’ videos of mums hiding from their kids while drinking wine. I don’t think it’s very funny. 😢 To say that I love hanging out with my children is taboo.

It’s all so sad.

I saw it everywhere in the 90’s. Many of my friends self harmed, a few had eating disorders, substance misuse, from about 13/14 onwards. It was all under the radar though. The only one I knew who would have been picked up in any official statistics was the one who actually got sectioned at 17.

I remember a girl cutting her arm in a lesson, with a compass, and a teacher walking over, seeing the blood and her crying and just turning and walking away again. He was pretty old and seemed out of his depth. That would have been in about 1995.

I can also think of several girls in my year who were seen as “odd” and who I know think were almost certainly autistic but just not diagnosed (snd I have no idea of the effect on their mental health, I didn’t know them well enough) and of a couple of boys with ADHD behaviours who weren’t diagnosed and later ended up in prison or rehab (and funnily enough, two of them went on to have sons who ended up being diagnosed with ADHD - which fits with my theory!)

So I don’t think there is an increase in teen mental health problems or in neurodivergency, it’s just seem and recognised today. Plus safeguarding training means than teaching staff don’t have the option of turning their backs on teenage girls who are cutting their arms.

It's not a straight forward yes no answer. I think there were mental health conditions that were ignored back in the 80's when I was at school but also something significant has changed in young people, it's not just a lower threshold for diagnosis.

I don't have answers just questions 2/4 of ours are on anti depressants for starters. But I think we have failed our young people as a society as they seem unable to deal with life in general, not sure where we went wrong exactly but social media and reality tv seem to be catalysts from personal experience. Only today I was trying to explain to my dd that we can't feel happy all the time, it's normal to feel sad sometimes, whereas she seems to think there's something wrong with feeling sad - I'm not talking about depression just that humans feel both ends of emotions and it's normal

In the 90s they use to medicate teens with strong antidepressants that they now recognise makes you suicidal. Thanks guys.

This. It wasn't talked about and if the problem was bad enough, you just went.

I was at school in the 90s, kids would come in having attempted suicide etc and it would be treated as a bit of a joke. If you got pregnant, you shut up about it or were kicked out. There was never discussion of mental health in lessons, I remember one pshe class where we did some relaxing breathing classes before GCSEs, that was it.

Phones mean social media follows kids everywhere which is bad, but the flip side is they have friends within easy reach the whole time. When I was growing up, you could feel properly alone at home, which could be good or bad.

It was non existent. “Kids are resilient” was the thinking, that we’d get over most things.

I witnessed the very sudden death of a parent aged 13. Day off school, then back as normal. I don’t remember ever being asked if I was OK, let alone offered any sort of counselling. In fact as the eldest dc it was expected I’d be supporting my remaining parent.

obviously I had issues, but it was all blamed on my hormones, or being a teenager, and it was my fault. No one ever thought to wonder if it was connected to a traumatic event and suggest help. I was just a horrible kid.

this was the 80’s.

I started upper school in 1991. A girl in the year below me hung herself- she was an only child and was found by her mother. It was so sad. The cause was said to be years of bullying at school (she was given a very hard time - I remember witnessing it) She always looked utterly defeated.

I started with panic attacks and agoraphobia in the eearly 80's. There was no help for me. I went to see a psychiatric nurse in the early 90's through university, where a Dr wanted to prescribe me diazapam without even blinking.

I was at the same school but a few years above the Rae Earl who wrote My Mad Fat Diary which is a good read if you want to learn more about mental health support in the 80's.

I think more including of sen in schools had also helped. At school in the 90s there was a sense of special schools being there to mop up kids who couldn't manage mainstream schools, but they weren't expected to achieve much there.

So a child and their parents had to pretend problems weren't there or risk being sent to a school that would pretty much write them off.

I left school in 1994 due to mental health issues. I was excluded from sitting exams by the local adult psychiatrist (no child or adolescent services) and school principal made it clear to me that if I turned up to sit exams he would have to turn me away. I was referred to the school psychology service which was a once off thing, no actual support just advised to hide it as no-one else should find out as then I could be labelled as "crazy" ,direct quote from the psychology service. I was bulimic, self harming and dealing with constant suicidal ideation with various attempts. I left school with no exams and looking back I was failed by the systems.

I saved myself by moving to a different country where I started on medication, was hospitalised at various points but the move saved my life as I can guarantee if I had stayed in the area I grew up in, I wouldn't have made it to 18.

I was talking about this with my dd(14) yesterday. During high school in the 90s I remember a girl who used to ‘worry a lot especially during exams’. I later heard she had a nervous breakdown in uni or during a levels. I also remember a girl who dropped out of uni as she was missing her family and home up north. The words anxiety or depression wasn’t mentioned.
I also remember how much I enjoyed my school days which was free from social media and wearing lots of makeup to school. the school work was fairly easy and I did well in my studies without having to stress. My parents both worked and I wasn’t close to them.
This really is in contrast to my dd who is very close to me and spends so much time with me as I don’t work.
She has had anxiety from ever since she can remember and long before she had access to social media. However she has been through a lot of trauma too. She finds school work so stressful (we now live abroad but she does Cambridge IGCSEs) that she has somatic symptoms. She also finds it extremely difficult to make friends. One of her friends that I know has OCD and she says most of her friends have mental health issues and it’s almost become a fashionable thing to say I’m so depressed. A lot of her friends have pressure from parents to do well.

I think it’s a combination of social media and the need to be perfect, tougher school work, people being more aware of MH amongst other factors.

I attended an appalling secondary modern school from 1978 to 1982. Some teachers there who should never have been allowed near a child, they did as much bullying as the kids and were often physically violent as well. Any child with a mental health problem would have been left to flounder - that was me, and I did. I suffered a reactive depression when I left school, but didn’t even have a vocabulary to say what was wrong with me. I just felt awful. I won’t have been the only one missed. In some ways, information being more widely available and its being more acceptable to talk about mental health problems can only be good. However, when I think of the ways other kids terrorised me back in pre-internet days, and what would be available to them now, I shudder. Also, the type of violence seems worse. I suspect I’d have been highly vulnerable to knife crime or similar. As it was, someone stabbed me in the hand with the point of a compass.

I’m pretty annoyed that for all the increased awareness we have these days, it doesn’t seem to go much further than awareness. In my local area the CAMHS waiting list is 3 years so that’s pretty useless. Saying stuff like “it’s ok not to be ok” is frustrating because awareness and talking don’t actually solve a lot of mental illnesses (and also everybody doesn’t want to talk about their mental health openly, and they shouldn’t have to) - they need a correct diagnosis followed by specific evidence-based treatment, and appropriate accommodations. To this day more often than not that isn’t there for kids or adults in the NHS or at school. So we may have come a long way except we really haven’t.

Teens today know too much, due to the internet..all life is exposed, there is no magic or mystery left for them.

I don't think they do any more, do they? I'm sure some teens do this kind of thing just because it's fun, but there is also an element of escapism and rejection of "adult norms" whereas a teenager who is feeling totally happy and secure with their journey towards adulthood doesn't tend to engage in drugs/alcohol at least not to the same extent.

The year I stated secondary in 1992, my mum died on the friday and I was expected to go back to school by everyone on the monday. I even got a detention and was shouted at in front of the class. because I didn’t do the homework set on the friday night - I was in the hospice watching her take her last breaths. Which is what I told the teacher in front of the class. The other children laughed and the teacher told me to grow up.

I had horrendous bullying all the way though - no one cared. I was told by teachers and my father that it must be me, I must be doing something to make them hate me.

I self harmed - no one cared. The only reason I didn’t end my life was that I didn’t have the courage to go through with it.

It was a selective school though and I wasn’t one of the high achievers (I wonder why!), I think they would have cared if i was one of the golden children.

i left at 16, it was 4 years of hell just trying to get through each day.

I was a teen in the 90's, I've always struggled with anxiety but my family just shamed me for it. I wasn't alone and can think of several others who had issues, one girl died of anorexia not long after leaving school. The worst long term outcome was for a family where DV was known to happen.

I have 4 DC, all ND, my eldest is on medication for anxiety, very much needed. I suspect the apple hasn't fallen too far from the tree from both DH and me, though I know this won't suit the narrative of many on here.

Going back generations in my family there are huge amounts of men who were alcoholics etc, my dad's mum was born in 1906 and she always had serious issues.

Those teens are adults aged 30s-40s now. Lots of adults that age have MH problems, clearly a proportion of that will stem from their childhood/teen years. I can now see that there was quite a bit going on when I was at school (90s), but that’s with hindsight. Lots of shit parenting too (I know a cohort on here like to sneer at “gentle parenting” but i don’t remember non-gentle parenting turning out loads of emotionally healthy non-disruptive children from my school days either). I am very glad social media wasn’t a thing when I was at school though, I was bullied quite enough.

This is awful. I hope life is much better for you now