SURVEY SHOWS HUGE RISE IN SELF-HARMING

'Deeply worrying' increase in mental health conditions

- By STORM NEWTON, PA

LEVELS of mental health are “deteriorating” and support services are “overwhelmed,” charities have warned, as a survey suggests one in four young adults in England suffers from conditions such as anxiety and depression.

There has also been a particular rise in mental health problems among women, while the proportion of people who reported having self-harmed has quadrupled since the year 2000, figures show.

Health leaders said the findings “paint a deeply worrying but sadly unsurprising picture” amid warnings the system is “overwhelmed, underfunded and unequal”.

It is the first time since 2016 that data from the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, which is carried out by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), the University of Leicester, and City St George’s, University of London, on behalf of NHS England, has been released.

It found that more than one in five people aged 16 to 74 had reported so-called “common mental health conditions”, which include generalised anxiety disorder, depressive episodes, phobias, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and panic disorder.