Inclusion

The national crisis of child mental health

The last ten years have seen a 92 per cent increase of eating disorders among young people and a 62 per cent rise in self-harming. The figures are shocking, but what are the reasons behind this explosion in children with serious mental health problems?

At least one in ten children in the UK have a diagnosable mental illness, and the numbers are only rising. But what are the reasons behind this explosion in children with serious mental health problems?


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The mass media have suddenly got it. As Every Child Journal and School Leadership Today have been proclaiming for a while, the crisis of the nation’s mental health is spiralling out of control. Tragically, it has taken a couple of young suicides to really focus the media’s collective mind on the explosion in unmet need for child mental health support.

The figures are really shocking. In the last four years, the admissions to A&E of young people with problems related to mental health have more than doubled to nearly 18,000. They are mostly young girls admitted for cutting or burning themselves, or for anorexia. The last official survey of the problem in 2004 showed that one in ten children below 18 had a diagnosable mental illness. That’s bad enough, but in the last three years alone, there has been a reported 110 per cent increase in the number of children and teenagers seeking help for eating disorders such as anorexia; and in the last two, an estimated 70 per https://www.selfharm.co.uk/cent increase in self-harm. More children are considering suicide than ever before, and nearly 80,000 children and young people suffer from severe depression.

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