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.