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 depressed and self harming at school. Teachers and pupils knew about the depression(not sh) but did nothing. It was ignored. So it did happen then. But I was definitely in the minority.

Problems then were hidden but I still think they are much more prevalent now.

No, life has been and continues to be very difficult.

Like other people though, I’m just glad there was no social media.

At least when I got home, I could shut myself away. School holidays were bliss, I never left the house or saw or spoke to anyone (no family and my remaining parent had to work double shifts). I was very alone but It was a break from the relentless bullying.

I can’t imagine the horror of the other children being able to use social media to bully me or to contact me after the school day.

I went to secondary school in 1983. All girls school. I don't recall girls crying or anyone having any problems which meant they couldn't cope with being in lessons.

I started teaching 2001 and again can't really recall students having problems which affected their ability to attend lessons.

Since lockdown there has been a surge in problems & students/parents seem to think school staff have a magic answer.

I think following are reasons:

• ridiculous exam targets are an issue & target setting & intervention if you're not up to scratch
• social media (but the majority can go online & not bully someone)
• unrealistic beauty standards (fake everything) when you watch clips from the 80s/90s girls were less exposed physically & wore less make up
• boys easy access to porn via the internet & the resulting unrealistic view of real life relationships
• increase in male violence & the normalisation of anal & strangulation (girls are probably considered frigid if they won't conform)
• increase in cost of buying house & worrying about affording one

I do also think that it's an epidemic - so many students struggling & it's become 'the norm'. So anyone who is struggling a bit is a lot more open about things. In the past they would have been discouraged about speaking up.

I don't know if it's a good or bad thing. The lack of resilience is a concern. I don't know how the students in school currently will cope with adult life & holding down a job. Life can be difficult & full of disappointment and knock backs. Having the skill set to deal with this is vital.

I don’t know that previous generations had any more or less of the “skillset” though. Plenty of MH problems in adults too.

the kids need to know that what they are feeling is normal and that life gets better
I think this is largely true for most teens. I would hope that the raised awareness around a lot of these issues is more helpful than not.
Whilst support for kids really struggling is pretty poor, there's a lot of useful advice and techniques for recognising certain problems and how to help yourself.
Those if us who had a harder time in the 80/90's and are fine now, maybe had better options, made slightly better decisions, it's probably down to lots of factors. But despite my own experience and knowledge, my own DD has struggled. I don't think I could have stopped that unfortunately, but I think I have been able to support her better and really empathise with her.
One poster made a point that made me smile - despite the rampant anorexia and self harm at school (same as mine), they remember it as being a happy time too. This is how I feel too, there were many dark moments and crushing insecurity for me, but also a time of real highs and intense friendships and fun.

I think it's shit now but it was also shit then. Lots of eating disorders in my friendship group as well as truanting, bullying, self-medication with drugs/alcohol, fallout from domestic violence and sexual abuse at home.
I think people have the words to describe these things now, and the labels.
I do think social media has made things worse but it has always been tough being a teen.

School and uni ( state) in 80s and 90,s - numerous girls with eating disorders, self harm - a few suicide attempts amongst peers and relatives of peers sadly some successful. I think everyone esp teenagers get depressed and anxious at times and we may have lost the right language to identify real mh issues from moments where feeling down is just part of life. No one can be happy the whole time but anything negative now seems to be described as mh issues which may or may not be helpful.

Social media definitely has an impact on letting bullies in and projecting perfection but I also think we need to find better words for mh issues which deal with nuances and the natural colour of life. It's too big a catch all

OMG exactly this. At my independent secondary school, girls did go seemingly relatively into mental hospitals for anorexia, and occasionally for "nervous breakdowns" too. It was kind of an understand that once that had happened, she would neve come back but would "seek a fresh start" at the local sink comp or crap college. It took me many years to recognise the shaming and the contagion hysteria for what it is. But even now aged 46 even now I still feel as though the time I spent in a mental hospital in my mid 20s means that I would be banned from any school reunions there. And certainly, I would never never feel comfortable attending any such events.

I went to university at 17 (Scotland) in the mid 1990s. Mine you this university apparently had a high suicide rate.

Not sure if that had anything to do with it but when I had depression there I was given SSRIs and counselling, kept an eye on by the university head of halls, (who happened to be in the psychology dept)

I needed to take an extra year in the end and this was authorised and I was given an extra years grant and tuition fees. So my experience was pretty good, I think around this time SSRIs became popular so I'm not sure if that had anything to do with it.

Or the cost of private inpatient treatment for ED is extremely expensive and whilst the parents may have been able to afford school fees, the additional cost of inpatient treatment to keep their child alive meant they had to return to the state system to continue their schooling?

There certainly is an element of MH issues being contagious and there have been studies conducted around this I think

I was a teen at that time & I remember eating disorders amongst friends. However I won't much rather be a teen then, I think the UK was more exciting & hopeful, less exam pressure, lack of social media.

I remember vomiting before a presentation & my leg was shaking throughout but I had no choice but to do it & it got easier.

I self harmed in the mid 90's. I was the only one my school had come across. And they had no idea how to deal with it. I'm a paediatric nurse and I can't get my head round the huge issues we have now.

No, seriously no. This was families for whom money was no object. Their daughters had simply become a source of shame and soiled goods, unmarriageable and unemployable, and so unworthy of future education.

Life was simpler. We were not bombarded with social media. We had school friends and a fortnightly copy of Shout/ sugar Just 17. Etc

I think we've also lost the ability to recognise that in some situations, it's ok and even normal to be anxious/ worried/ stressed.

It could also have been meant to protect them - school was absolutely brutal to anybody they knew was vulnerable. All they would have got was targeted bullying every second after they came back and without the added issue of social media, a move across town to a different cohort could be enough to reduce it to an occasional being seen when out instead of following them wherever they go within a couple of hours. In your situation, the chances of the previous stuff following them to another independent would have been highly likely due to the smaller number of wealthy families - a comp would mean fewer people would know somebody who knew them. And it could be felt that a degree of anonymity was possible in a comp of 1200 kids, rather than a smaller private, together with lower expectations taking some pressure off to achieve.

I'm amazed that so many people actually got through the bearpit of secondary sometimes.

No one at my school had any open MH struggles/refusal.
If you want to know what’s different now, let me tell you there are hashtags on twitter for eating disorders where tweets get THOUSANDS of likes and retweets. I can only assume the same applies to self harm etc.

In the late 70’s when I was aged 15-16, we knew nothing about mental health - the phrase ‘mental health’ was not mentioned, together with many phrases used now. Perhaps ignorance was bliss? Some of us might have suffered but just accepted it as part of life’s ups and downs…

“Some of us might have suffered but just accepted it as part of life’s ups and downs…”

maybe, or maybe there would be fewer adults today with MH problems if they had been recognised and addressed as teenagers. It’s hard to know.

Maybe in turn if those teens of the 70s/80s had had help, their own teens might not be suffering so much now. It’s hard to say either way.

I think the idea this wasn't an issue in the 80/90s is wrong.
I had MH issues that were ignored by all, culminating in a huge breakdown and more than a year in a psychiatric hospital which was full of teenagers - although it was an adult hospital.
IME, it just wasn't talked about and there was no support unless there was a crisis - ie risk to life.
I was at boarding school - loads of us had MH issues. Anorexia, self harm, substance misuse- it was rife. But no one talked to teachers or parents.

I completely agree with this.

I am so thankful that support and recognition for problems is so much better now.

I really wish that we could go back in time and give some of that same support to kids in the 70s and 80s. I had friends/peers who killed themselves,; friends with terrible eating disorders; one boy was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and we never saw him again; several friends with significant substance abuse problems.

Someone who had lived through the war wouldn't have been a parent in the 80s and 90s, they would have been in their 50s and 60s!

OP, there was plenty of suffering, it either wasn't talked about or, if it was, no-one gave a shit, or you could be actually bullied for being a victim of eg sexual abuse.

Five girls in my GCSE year got pregnant (out of about 100), at my school they were allowed to stay on to take GCSEs but not to stay on to sixth form. Other local schools didn't allow pregnant girls to stay on at school at all, so they left with no qualifications. And they didn't get any sympathy or concern, they got called slags and would have much older men target them for sex because they were "easy".

I'm so sorry. I went through something similar and there was absolutely no help. Like you, none of the adults in my life even asked me how I was feeling. Yes also to being treated as a horrible kid when I was struggling to cope.

I do think social media has made some things worse, but back then I didn't have anyone to talk to about how I felt - at least with social media I could access support and talk to people going through similar things.

I'm sure life in the 80s and 90s could be good if you had a close and supportive family and good friends. But if you didn't, and anything went wrong, life could be quite brutal

Errrr .... Wrong. My parents were born in 1922 and 1928, I was born in 1966 and was a teen in the 80's. My Dad was a tank commander in Africa and Italy, and my Mum was a teenager in occupied Italy.