Last time I wrote for A Lust for Life about the link between poverty and poor mental health. However, it’s widely acknowledged that mental illness affects people from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds.
Mental illness is often referred to as ‘the Western Disease’ – There is a misconception that in countries where there is a struggle merely to survive that mental illness doesn’t occur. The unspoken subtext of this assessment is that conditions like anxiety and depression are somehow ‘indulgent’ – that they happen because we have nothing better to worry about.
Personally, I don’t buy into that particular brand of patronising hokum. It’s really difficult to compare how cultures assess mental illnesses – some don’t acknowledge that diseases of the mind even exist, whilst others might call it demonic possession. That doesn’t mean it isn’t happening throughout the world, or that mental illnesses aren’t an inevitable part of the experience of being human in the same way physical illnesses are.
Having said all of that, I believe there are aspects of Western culture which make it difficult to enjoy good mental health. Since the 80s, consumerist capitalism in Britain and America has gone turbo-charged. Advertising has become the wallpaper of our world, constantly and subconsciously reinforcing the notion that happiness is achieved via the buying of possessions, through consuming of food and drink (although of course NOT from the subsequent inevitable weight gain). From every angle, we face powerful imagery and messaging which tells us we aren’t quite good enough and encourages us to strive for transient and superficial goals – the losing of a stone, the gaining of muscles in the gym, or a flat screen TV.
We’re also incredibly sedentary and spend a huge proportion of our day staring at screens – whether that’s our phone’s screen as we go about our day, the PC screen at work or the television at home. Today’s young people take in more information during one day than their grandparents did during a whole year of their lives. Our minds are constantly stimulated, whilst our bodies remain still. Human beings simply aren’t designed to live this way. We’re supposed to be running around, foraging for food during the day, then spending our evenings socialising face-to-face with other people.
A lot of what we encounter during an average day – whether it’s a crowded train, an impending deadline or an online troll, activates our bodies ‘flight or fight’ response. This, originally designed to help us escape from or fend-off predators, releases adrenaline into our systems and with no physical outlet for the chemicals which oxygenate our blood and pump our muscles up ready for action, they instead cause feelings of stress and anxiety. Overtime, this also leads to the production of a hormone known as cortisol, which is responsible for making us feel depressed.
Not only is modern life conducive to mental health issues, it also means a lot of the time we don’t get our basic human needs met. Talk to any Psychologist and they will tell you the universal human needs are:
- Being Loved;
- Being heard;
- Having a sense of belonging;
- Having a sense of achievement;
- Having purpose.
This brings me on to our school system, here in England.
Under the coalition government of 2010-2015, then-Education Secretary Michael Gove decided to narrow the curriculum, placing emphasis on traditional, academic subjects. This meant that the arts, music and sport were gradually squeezed out of the school day, because there are only so many hours in it. Gove made this decision because British children were slipping down the league tables for basic numeracy and literacy levels and it seemed therefore like the logical thing. However, what he failed to take into account is that we are behind counties in Scandinavia who do not send their children to school until they are 8 (and even then a large part of their day is dedicated to learning through play and they don’t get any homework).
The next Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, who took over from Gove during a cabinet reshuffle under the coalition and then continued her role when the Conservatives won outright in 2015, has also imposed more and more testing on children and young people to ‘improve standards’. The Department for Education aspires to an education system like they have in Korea, where the children perform very well academically. However, these countries also have terrifyingly high paediatric and adolescent suicide rates….
When combined with ever-spiralling class sizes, the changes made to the education system led to three things:
- Low self-esteem, because children were being tested on a narrower set of academic criteria, so those whose talents lay outside of those criteria did not feel valued, or a sense of achievement (see above). It should be noted that low self-esteem is a primary diagnostic criteria for the four most common mental illnesses in under 21s – anxiety, depression, self-harm and eating disorders;
- Increased stress levels/anxiety amongst pupils owing to the amount of testing;
- Increased stress/anxiety levels amongst teachers, who were now spending most of their days doing paperwork and ticking boxes as opposed to actually teaching.
Teachers expressed their concern to the government, as did I it on behalf of young people. Teachers were ignored and I was unceremoniously dropped as the government’s Mental Health Champion in May this year. So in addition to not having a sense of purpose or achievement, we are also not being heard.
Is it any wonder, given all of the above, mental illness in children and teenagers has increased by 70% in a generation and continues to spiral at a dramatic rate?
Our brains remain in developmental stages until we are 22 years old. It is crucial, during these stages, that we have our basic human needs met. If they are not, it can impair our cognitive development – and we never get that time back.
Our government’s response to the increased amount of pressure on young people is that ‘life is tough’ and school should prepare you for that. Now, I’m not for one second suggesting that we should wrap children in cotton wool and shelter them from anything potentially upsetting or dangerous. But I don’t believe that the ‘stress is good for you’ argument should be used to pile indefinite amounts of pressure on children and young people, either. And that, from my point of view as someone who has been privy to the changes in schools over the past six years, seems to be what is happening.
So, the second thing I would do if I were Prime Minister would be to change the culture of schools, starting by ensuring that young people have their universal human needs met. I would let children be children.
Next time – Meet the Self-Esteem Team, the group of which I am one third and find out how we are trying to improve life for children and young people in schools.
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