Do mental health campaigners make matters worse?

IT WAS not meant to be like this. For years, mental health campaigners promised that the abandonment of the traditional stiff upper lip, coupled with greater sensitivity and understanding, would build a happier society.

- Leo McKinstry

That recipe has been followed with ever greater enthusiasm in modern Britain.

Our habitual reserve has been replaced by an eagerness to express our feelings.

Alongside the promotion of diversity, the mission to improve our mental health has become the most fashionable cause in our public life. Yet the paradoxical outcome is Britain now seems in the grip of a deepening mental health crisis.

Greater awareness appears to have worsened the problem.

Based on professional studies, the public has never been miserable, anxious and despondent as they are today.

On Tuesday, a new report from medical journal The Lancet revealed that cases of eating disorders and self-harm among teenage girls have increased by 42 per cent since the pandemic.

Even this staggering rise may be an underestimate, since NHS data last year showed the number of children admitted to hospital with eating disorders was up 70 per cent since Covid.

Just as worryingly, other NHS data indicated one in four young people who spent some of their adolescence in lockdown now has a mental health disorder.