LAST week, a major survey of mental health in England revealed that “young women have become a key high risk group”. That 16-24 year-old women are in the grip of a mental health crisis has been a big story in recent years. Last month’s Scottish Health Survey revealed “significantly lower” levels of mental wellbeing in young women and a St Andrews University study found that 15-year-old girls in Scotland showed the worst deterioration in terms of health complaints and psychological indicators, than in any of 33 countries measured.
Mental health recording and diagnosis has changed considerably over the last century, and a common reaction among older generations is to say – yes, we had these problems in the old days, but we just called it unhappiness or lethargy or worrying and got on with it. The implication here is that young people are self-diagnosing their way into illness.
But last week’s NHS survey didn’t revolve around people who had sought diagnosis or reported mental health problems. It was compiled by interviewing people and screening them for signs and symptoms of certain disorders. For instance, most of the people screened as having post traumatic stress disorder had not sought a diagnosis or received treatment for it. One of the shocking things about the report’s findings was that between 2007 and 2014, self-harm had trebled among women. In 2014, one in five 16-to-24-year-old women reported having self-harmed, about twice the rate for young men.
Earlier this year, I interviewed parents and teenagers about mental health, and discovered a world in which anxiety, seemed endemic among girls. All too often, both over social media and in their real lives, there was an almost febrile atmosphere of competing to have a label or diagnosis. One mother said: “There is a positive bidding war going on among these girls, over who is the most anxious – who has got a diagnosis, who doesn’t have a diagnosis, are you a fraud? Are you not a fraud?”
It would be easy to write this off as a cult of anxiety, almost like the old-fashioned notion of mass hysteria, but clearly, there is genuine reason for concern around the mental health of these young people, who are indeed struggling. You only have to look at the past few years’ data to see that depression and anxiety are becoming a young person’s issue, and that the gender gap is widening. And mostly this has happened over the space of the last decade.
So what happened in those years? Well, several things. The economic crisis has made it more difficult for young people to start out on their working adult lives. Then there's the explosion in the use of social media.
We can’t afford not to look at whether social media may be the source of this problem. We have a generation growing up with a method of communication which appears to create a constant need to be “on” and connected, and which also requires the creation of an online identity and image. We have young people assailed by cyber-bullying, yet unable to switch off because they feel that when connection is severed, they almost do not exist. We have kids staying up into the small hours on social media, which is linked to sleep problems. Graphs, meanwhile, show that rising mental health issues among young people in different countries roughly mirror the pattern of rising social media use.
But why should this affect young women more than men? One reason is that body image pressures are amplified online. Social media is a very visual culture, and young women frequently present themselves through photographs and selfies, often distorted through filters, or highly made-up, or lit in such a way that they bear little resemblance to their actual physical selves. The pressures, one teen mental health campaigner told me, are enormous. “You need to get so many likes on your photos for it to validate that you’re pretty. You’re constantly comparing yourself with other people online – filtered pictures, pictures that aren’t even real.”
There are also communities and hashtags around self-harm and eating disorders, and while a like-minded online community can be helpful and a solace, it can also exacerbate and egg on.
It seems to me that as a society, we have lost our way. We have come to focus on the diagnosis and the disorder, rather than the causes and prevention. But our mental illnesses are so often symptoms of the unrealistic and often unbearable pressures that society puts on us human animals. Social media is a new source of these. Hence, there is an acute need for awareness-raising and education on how to stay psychologically healthy while using social media.
We need to be saying that there are ways of looking after your mental health in the digital age. One of those involves occasionally switching off and logging-out.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here