High hopes: how shrooms and giggles could help fix our mental health crisis

AT SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST LONDON THE BIG IDEAS, SAYS CLAUDIA COCKERELL, WERE ABOUT CURING THE PLANET'S MINDS

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East London was even buzzier than usual last week.

Thousands packed into venues around Shoreditch for the inaugural South by Southwest (SXSW) London, a music, tech and film festival which started life in sunny Austin, Texas. It was a broad church: Tony Blair argued we should have AI doctors and nurses to relieve pressure on the NHS, while rapper Tinie Tempah backed a scheme to get young people away from their screens and onto the dancefloor.

Many of the talks led back to the mental health crisis, which has overtaken cancer and obesity to become the biggest global health concern.

Industry leaders laid out their visions for alleviating the crisis, with solutions spanning tech, psychedelics and prescribed laughter.

At a talk simply named "The Mental Health Crisis, one of the leading child psychiatrists in the US, Dr Harold S Koplewicz, was unequivocal about the prime suspect. "What happened between 2014 and 2018? We didn't change the water supply. We didn't change the telephone lines. We had social media." Youth mental health has deteriorated with alarming speed in recent years. Analysis of NHS data by the charity Mind shows that more than 600,000 under-18s are on mental health waiting lists, with a quarter having waited for over two years for "meaningful" care such as an appointment with a psychiatrist.

Yet the challenges persist even when they get to the appointment. "One of the few things that psychiatry doesn't have is an objective test," said Koplewicz. "We have lots of people who are inattentive, but they don't all have ADHD.