Suffer the children? The dangers of expanding the realm of mental health

This is an edited version of my foreword to an important new report by Lucy Beney for the Family Education Trust.

Suffer The Children: Why having a ‘mental health professional’ in every school is not the answer by Lucy Beney is a refreshing, must-read antidote to orthodoxies associated with the enormous spike in numbers of young people who have mental-health problems. Too often, shocking revelations, such as the fact that 20 per cent of school-aged children in the UK have a diagnosis, can lead to knee-jerk ‘something must be done’ policies, nodded through with little scrutiny or challenge. The cross-party, near unanimous support for placing a mental-health professional in every school is a pertinent example, and a worthy subject of Beney’s interrogation, noting ironically that such assumed solutions may well make matters worse.

Challenges to well-meaning initiatives are often swatted away as evidence of a hard-nosed lack of sympathy for suffering children. So, what is invaluable about Beney’s essay is that it is suffused with compassion, informed by her own clinical practice. But she also does that rare service of dispassionately digging deeper beneath the stats and surface crisis. Readers are forced to look beyond the medical model of treating and managing ‘the symptoms of our children’s distress’; we are urged instead to be more curious about its social origins. The author advocates that we ‘take a clear-eyed look at where we are going wrong, and not focus on what is allegedly “wrong” with our children’ (my emphasis). She concedes this can raise difficult and controversial issues. And what is deemed controversial can even be as little asking questions about the prevailing narrative – as I know to my cost.

At the start of the year, I gave several speeches in the House of Lords in debates on the new Mental Health Bill. I voiced my concerns about how ever-greater numbers of especially young people are being encouraged – often by government-backed policies – to view the human condition itself – and more and more aspects of normal, if adverse or painful, life events – through the prism of mental illness or neurodivergence.

My modest aim was to probe to see if one of the unintended consequences of pathologising ever more aspects of life might reduce the time and resources available to those who desperately need professional help, by clogging up the system with inappropriate referrals and arguably over-diagnosed conditions. I quoted Tony Blair, who recently warned: ‘You‘ve got to be careful of encouraging people to think they’ve got some condition rather than simply confronting the challenges of life.’ I cited the secretary of state for health, Wes Streeting, who has queried whether over-diagnosis is adding to problems of worklessness and sick leave, sadly wasting the potential of those increasing numbers who remove themselves from productive work because of mental health-related problems.

In other words, what I argued was pretty mainstream, and yet…

My speeches were picked up by the media, and led to an onslaught of abusive emails, attacks on social media, and an official complaint to the Lords standards body. I have made lots of speeches on far more contentious topics, so was taken aback by the howls of indignation from young people in distress (and their parents). But this backlash taught me a lesson: in contemporary culture, conditions such as ADHD and mental illness go far beyond medical diagnosis or the need for expert pharmacological or therapeutic intervention – these labels have now been internalised as part of individuals’ identity.

And as with other expressions of identity in the political realm, any challenge to the orthodoxy is treated as insensitive heresy and threatened with ‘you can’t say that’ cancellation. This is not a cynical ruse. People take any objective critique personally, as an affront to their ‘lived experience’ and they genuinely are hurting. But for this reason alone, we need more debate and it’s precisely why we need to interrogate what is going on here, to ask tough questions: why do so many young people perceive themselves in mental turmoil? Why is the old regressive stigma around psychiatric conditions been replaced by generations who now compete to have an official diagnosis, as an unquestioned right? And much more. In that context, Suffer The Children is invaluable as a contribution to opening up a richer and more nuanced debate.

The essay bravely tackles sacred cows, such as the ‘mental health industrial complex’. The huge increase in classification in the psychological realm has moved the job of diagnosis far beyond the field of psychiatry. There’s a veritable industry of counsellors, therapists and psychotherapeutic practitioners, private providers, online diagnostic toolkits and ‘sickinfluencers’, who now label an ever-expanding set of behaviours as mental ill-health. What’s more, swathes of this unregulated sector have embraced ideological positions, tangling up critical social justice theory with medical terminology; adopting an affirmative approach to young people’s demands, which as Beney points out has been so damaging (and clinically harmful) in relation to gender confusion.

This is all leading to an unintended but inevitable situation of making matters worse. As the number of labelled conditions has grown, ‘the more people start to identify with the symptoms’. And arguably, as schools have become more proactive in promoting mental-health awareness, and more staff are dedicated to pupils’ emotional wellbeing, the more the rates of mental illness rise.

Heightened awareness seems as likely to embed the language and mores of mental health into how we socialise children and create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Primary-school pupils can be heard using vocabulary usually associated with psychiatry rather than the playground, and describe themselves as anxious, depressed and traumatised. University students justify no-platforming for fear that hearing speakers they disagree with will induce PTSD; exams are traumatising; set texts require trigger warnings.

Pathologies we obsessively make young people aware of are colonising their minds, so unsurprisingly, they will interpret every difficulty through the prism of mental disorder.

Beney is especially convincing on what teachers should be concentrating on in the classroom. If schools are focusing children on homing in narrowly on their own internal feelings, rather than more productively encouraging them to look outward beyond themselves – to the wonders, intellectual adventures and creative hemisphere that Knowledge (with a capital K) offers – they may well get stuck in a doom-loop.

I don’t necessarily agree with all of Beney’s explanation or solutions, but I loved this essay’s demand that ‘adults need to re-enter the room’ to tackle what she rightly describes as ‘a very large, complex and growing problem’. Every educator, policy maker, legislator, parent and, indeed, young person should read this important and profound essay.

Suffer The Children: Why having a ‘mental health professional’ in every school is not the answer by Lucy Beney will be launched at the Family Education Trust annual conference in London today, Saturday 14 June. Download the report here.