To ask why children and teens have such bad mental health? (pre-pandemic)

[peepeelongstocking]

Surely there must be something massively wrong in society, but what is it? I’m inclined to think it’s social media (screens as a whole really), and a lack of prospects for the future (due to high house prices and lack of jobs). Surely there must be more to it though.

I know we’re diagnosing MH issues much more, but it’s rare that you’d find an older person who remembers feeling suicidal during their teen years for example. That seems to be more or less standard now.

I’d love to know what others think it is!

They might've not been diagnosed with depression or anxiety or whatever.. but for hundreds of years children and teens struggled and self harmed. You just know them as the "weirdos" ,the pot heads,the druggies, the alcoholics,the gang members, the feckless and reckless, the overly sexual girls , the homeless,the bad seeds/influence etc. The "failures". And that's the ones that stayed alive or were still around to be seen.

I forgot a very important category. The super happy go lucky ones.
I used to be describe as "the happiest girl I've ever met" by several adults/peers in my teens.

By that point, I had been emotionally and sometimes physically abused by my mother,sexually abused several times,bullied, was selfharming(cutting and burning) , drinking too much, had sex too young ,various risky behaviour,unhealthy relationships (not just in the romantic sense).

Just because you(general you) didn't see it ,it doesn't mean it didn't happen. Life doesn't revolve around your limited,rose tinted glasses experience.

The constant pressure that technology has brought about allows no downtime. The barrage of information is overwhelming and the human brain is not equipped to deal with it. It’s like sprinting on a treadmill but not being able to get off. Technology moves on, but humans are still humans.

Children are under enormous pressure to succeed. The expectations put on them by schools and parents are huge and the developing brain is so overwhelmed it can’t concentrate on growing the person. The idea that one false move has the potential to ruin the rest of your life is a real concern with the capability of social media.

[quote giggly]@Sara2000 That’s you presuming that pp do not have children with MH/ NDD issues.
I don’t think it’s a horrible thread at all it’s pp answering a question and a very relevant one at that.[/quote]
A lot of posters are answering it based in "feelings", assumptions,bias and prejudice.
Not as informative as you think.

I don't think they have more than young people did when I was a teenager (I'm 40). I think we just know more about it, talk more about it.

It's also more talked about nowadays. Looking back at my own childhood, I had lots of issues which my parents ignored and that I kept hidden for fear of being a nuisance.

I was a teenager in the late 80s/early 90s and I remember plenty of miserable teenagers and I know plenty of people who had eating disorders that were dismissed as attention seeking and who attempted suicide. Depression and anxiety were not invented by this generation of teens, they're just the first ones who've been raised in an environment where it might be noticed by responsible adults

I agree with these three comments.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s, turned 18 in 1999. In my year group at secondary school we had two suicides and who knows how many attempted suicides, several people self-harming, a few kids who just stopped coming to school and played truant every day, kids with eating disorders, and kids who had emotional issues. There were at least three teen pregnancies including one who hid her pregnancy right until she went into labour. A girl at another school who some of us knew hid her pregnancy too, delivered the baby herself in her bathroom and then killed it and hid the body. She got caught and was found to have serious mental health problems. We would spend evenings and weekends drinking White Lightning and MD 20/20 on park benches in the freezing cold, smoking, once we were old enough to pass for 18 we were out in town every weekend drinking ourselves silly or getting off our faces on E.

If we'd told anyone we were feeling down or depressed, the absolute most we could expect from a sympathetic person would have been a cup of tea and a 'pull yourself together pat on the arm. If the person wasn't sympathetic we'd have been told to toughen up, that's life, its part of being a moody teen.

Parents now are more child-centric and are more likely to notice their child is floundering, that's not a bad thing and the facts do not support this stereotype of modern day children being "snowflakes".

Mental health services are struggling due to years and years of increasing cuts to funding.

Unless you have either experienced mental health issues as a child or teenager or parented one with mental health issues, then the responses is purely based on assumption and prejudices.

I'm mid 50s and I would say of my group of 4 friends aged 15, all of us had MH issues. There was zero help from school or home at the time. We smoked and we drank. It's really no different from my 15 year old dd now and her group of friends. They are more aware and there is not enough, but there is more help available now.

@LeGrandBleu I agree, it's just ridiculous to constantly praise children for everything they do. All I hear is good job, good playing, good walking, good this, good that and it becomes meaningless. It is even worse when it's in a faux cheesy, cheery voice.

From personal experience, both of my DC suffer with anxiety, they were both naturally high acheivers academically but they've both said they were never good enough for school.
Their senior school assessed their predicted grades as high from the day they started and from that point in they could either aceive what was expected or under achieve. No matter how hard they worked they were never given credit for the effort they put in it was simply expected.
Even worse than that was the marking of work with an 'EBI' Even Better If Statement, a next step for personal growth. So they'd achieve the stated aim but there was always an additional thing they could have done to be better, in their minds Even Better If = Never Good Enough.
I would crumble under that pressure.

@Hollybollybingbong

This is similar with my son. The target grades he has are, in reality, unachievable. He constantly feels like he is failing and these grades are everywhere. These grades are on the front of his books and always mentioned.

Even worse than that was the marking of work with an 'EBI' Even Better If Statement, a next step for personal growth. So they'd achieve the stated aim but there was always an additional thing they could have done to be better, in their minds Even Better If = Never Good Enough.

I'm really sorry your dc found this a burden. I'm a teacher and, much as I hate the bloody endless marking acronyms, the concept of there always being something you can improve on in your piece of work, however well you did, has always been the norm in school, surely?

I absolutely agree with you about the nonsense of everything being judged against their projected grades from the beginning of secondary though. It's good for the lower ability kids, because they can basically only meet expectations or exceed them, but for the high ability kids it's relentlessly frustrating.

Living with the expectations to achieve what previous generations have (home owner by [X] age, [X] amount in savings, able to retire comfortably by [X] age etc) yet having very little of the leg ups, security and help they did. Jobs are sparse, inflation has far outweighed salaries, and houses are insanely expensive.

Claiming my generation aren't resilient because we aren't taught how to be is condescending and frankly, incorrect. And now Gen Z are growing up seeing this with wider eyes than any generation before them.

@lumberingaboutthehouse

You honestly don't believe it is a problem? My niece jumped off a bridge age 11 (miraculously survived) and CAHMS and social services at the hospital told me that they have daily suicide attempt cases now in children and teens when it used to be much less common. Now I see it all the time in parenting groups online, parents asking advice about their self harming and or suicidal teen. As a parent of a teen myself I now realise it is rife. It is terrifying.

DCs school were very clear that predicted grade were just that, a prediction and measure of what they could achieve at GCSEs but that this might change up or down depending on circumstances, how hard they worked and the exam on the day etc.

30 years ago a boy in my year killed himself a week before GCSE results - everyone then said it was due to exam pressure.

I think there is even more pressure on kids to excel now but at the same time parents are more distant (because of busy work or their own or kids activities or because of their own addiction to social media) and so less able to reassure their children and provide the stable home life that would balance it out.

I know many families that rarely sat down to a single meal together before this year, constantly running children to clubs and activities or when they were at home all in separate rooms on various devices.

A lot of these responses are quite sad to read as they are so condemning of the parenting. From my experience, it often seems to just come out of the blue. This is a problem with society, somehow, I don't know how, I've thought so much about this, but let's not jump to blaming the parents and home life if you haven't been through it directly.

@lazylinguist Used occasionally and EBI can be useful, used in every single price of work it's soul destroying. There's also an element of moving the goal posts, my DC would do exactly what was requested, fulfilled the set criteria but the marking policy was 'for growth' so the mark itself could be great but they always had to add a comment.

As ridiculous as it sounds my DD was once disappointed with 96% for an essay, because she could have done X, Y or Z, at no point could she take joy for a job well done. (Of course at home we told her she was great but we're 'just parents' what do we know?)
Now DD, at Uni gets angry if she doesn't excell, she uses it as 'I'll show you' but also puts far too much pressure on herself to get a 1st in every piece of work.
DS started pulling back when he was coming up to A levels, no longer seeing the point, after 2 years at uni, suffering with depression he couldn't face being judged anymore and left.
These are 2 quiet hard working children who never caused any trouble in class and it was just too easy for these compliant kids to be left to look after their own self esteem whilst the noisier/ livelier/ troubled children got the attention, praise and motivational treats.

my story - imagine you have a popular boy who struggled a bit with transition from pre-school to primary, a popular boy who was talented at sport. So always had friends and on the face of it was very happy.

Imagine that boy suddenly and unexpectedly can't cope with going to school at 10 years old and starts behaving in an unusual way. Refusing to enter school , refusing to go into classes. Imagine that boy starts completely withdrawing from all of his friends.

Imagine the response from others when this happens to this boy. The parents are told that they have not taught resilience. The boy has stopped eating, the boy wont' sleep, at the prospect of school the boy is trying to escape the house, says he wants to die and tries to jump out of windows in your home.

People think you are making it up because this is a popular boy, so the parents must be getting it wrong, it must be because he was talented at sport and they encouraged it. It must be because their home lives are chaotic (they are not).

Imagine the judgement you get because this boy now won't go to school despite the fact that the parents will be blamed for the poor attendance.

This child was autistic and masked School laughed at the prospect he could be autistic when it was raised by CAMHS when he was in crisis. He is now 14 and is still struggling. He can't cope with school but wants desperately to, there are no services to help him, no schools to help him. because it's either mainstream or learning difficulties, he can't cope in mainstream but is really intelligent.

He has long periods of depression that are not caused by parental indifference or chaotic lives. He would love to be able to go to college but his mum and dad are desperately worried that he cannot, without the services, attain the skills needed to do any normal things.

We are parents just like every other parent, normal non chaotic parents whose world have been turned upside down by neurological differences and mental health issues. We are lucky to have our son alive, that is our goal. Nothing else matters.

We could be any one of you.

food standards have dropped considerably too. It's a sad fact that our food is less nutritious than in was 30 years ago due to over farming. plus the additional pesticides used to grow it as demand is so high due to population booms and increased wealth (in some countries) means we are all consuming more chemicals that are messing with our minds and bodies. If we could return to more of a make it from scratch mindset rather than be so used to eating food that has been prepared for us, with it's high salt and high preservative content, i think we would go some way to inproving the mental health of many.

@cantdothisnow1

my story - imagine you have a popular boy who struggled a bit with transition from pre-school to primary, a popular boy who was talented at sport. So always had friends and on the face of it was very happy.

Imagine that boy suddenly and unexpectedly can't cope with going to school at 10 years old and starts behaving in an unusual way. Refusing to enter school , refusing to go into classes. Imagine that boy starts completely withdrawing from all of his friends.

Imagine the response from others when this happens to this boy. The parents are told that they have not taught resilience. The boy has stopped eating, the boy wont' sleep, at the prospect of school the boy is trying to escape the house, says he wants to die and tries to jump out of windows in your home.

People think you are making it up because this is a popular boy, so the parents must be getting it wrong, it must be because he was talented at sport and they encouraged it. It must be because their home lives are chaotic (they are not).

Imagine the judgement you get because this boy now won't go to school despite the fact that the parents will be blamed for the poor attendance.

This child was autistic and masked School laughed at the prospect he could be autistic when it was raised by CAMHS when he was in crisis. He is now 14 and is still struggling. He can't cope with school but wants desperately to, there are no services to help him, no schools to help him. because it's either mainstream or learning difficulties, he can't cope in mainstream but is really intelligent.

He has long periods of depression that are not caused by parental indifference or chaotic lives. He would love to be able to go to college but his mum and dad are desperately worried that he cannot, without the services, attain the skills needed to do any normal things.

We are parents just like every other parent, normal non chaotic parents whose world have been turned upside down by neurological differences and mental health issues. We are lucky to have our son alive, that is our goal. Nothing else matters.

We could be any one of you.

I'm so sorry for what you and you boy have been through, and still are.

As ridiculous as it sounds my DD was once disappointed with 96% for an essay, because she could have done X, Y or Z

That's kind of what I meant. Numerical marks make it equally clear that there's always room for improvement unless you get 100%. No system of marking really tends to say "This was perfect, you have nothing more to work on". But the school or the teacher should have been making it clear through praise how brilliantly your dc were doing, and should have made it clear that in cases like theirs the EBI was an 'icing on the cake thing' that school policy made the teachers add even when work was well-nigh perfect.

cantdothisnow1 Your poor boy.

ComeOnBabyHauntMyBubble thank you , you get it, it's refreshing to read your posts on here.

Parent bashing and blaming is sadly the normal response.

'There by the grace of god go I' seems the most apt phrase for the situation.

I'd agree social media, and too much time not doing real things which is the corollary to that.

Also not enough independence, starting right from childhood, along with too much adult material and to o much pressure.

Shitty education that leaves them with poor thinking skills and no historical perspective.

The message, again and again, that things that make them uncomfortable are damaging makes them less resilient.

No sense of meaning, little sense of deep connection to meaning, to nature, to others, to the community. They have these things in a very superficial way but it's like an all-sugar diet - immediately satisfying but doesn't build muscle.

@lazylinguist

cantdothisnow1 Your poor boy.

Thank you.

Our story is sadly very common though, there is no help for these children because of woeful cuts to child mental health services. That is the tragedy.

I spend a lot of time lobbying MPs about the wasted childhoods and the fact that there needs to be specialist provision for bright children who can't cope in mainstream, these children if helped in childhood could be an asset to society.

This thread has hit a nerve with me.

to all experiencing child mental health issues and the judgement that accompanies it.

@cantdothisnow1 - that is very similar to my sons story although he is still a bit younger. He tried to throw himself out of the upstairs window in his classroom when very distressed. Not many of people's suggestions are relevant to why my son has mental health issues on top of the autism. I hope you and your son get all the support you need going forward.