Theodore Dalrymple

How we drive our children mad

If Britain really does have a youth mental health crisis, it’s not hard to see why

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Mental health is a slippery concept at best and according to the annual prevalence rates given in the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, people in north America and Europe suffer from an average of about two-and-a-half psychiatric conditions a year. This suggests that either we are all mad or the American Psychiatric Association is mad (though with a shrewd eye to the main chance).

It is hardly surprising then, since the child is father to the adult, that at least 10 per cent of children in Britain suffer from ‘diagnosable mental disorders’, to use a phrase much favoured in the press. Given the way that mental disorders are diagnosed, more or less by checklist, I am surprised that it is so few. Using the right methods, you can get any figure you think of. That is why we should view ‘crises’ in mental health, such as that recently touted, with caution and scepticism.

Nevertheless, casual observation would suggest what surveys have also found, that children in Britain have a more difficult and less attractive existence than children in any other comparable country in Europe. The British seem to be more afraid of their children than any other people known to me; they often seem to shrink from them in the street. Their method of child-rearing — I speak grosso modo, of course — seems to be neglect tempered by overindulgence, with outbursts of exasperation. Never have I seen elsewhere such public shrieking at children by maternal termagants as in Britain. Tenderness towards children is much less in evidence in Britain than in, say, France.

Perhaps it has always been so, for deep cultural reasons. But children nowadays are subjected to new habit-forming pressures that pile Pelion on their Ossa.

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