A teenage girl stares out of a window.
Nearly a quarter of 16-year-old girls in England (23%) were in contact with public mental health services last year, a report has revealed.
That’s twice the proportion accessing this care four years before, data compiled by researchers from the Institute for Fiscal Studies show.
The country’s leading mental health charity told Forbes that the pandemic, as well as Britain’s high inflation rate, have taken a serious toll on the mental health of the country’s youth, making it harder for many to cope with every day life.
A greater proportion of 16-year-old boys were also in contact with publicly-funded mental health services than four years earlier. But the growth was less stark, and consistent, than for girls.
The statistics form part of a report on disability and inequality in the U.K.
Researchers found disparities in mental health between young adults with higher and lower levels of educational qualification.
Although mental health problems appeared to have increased across the board over the last few decades, young people with a lower level of education were particularly likely to have poor mental health.
The report authors noted that a reduction in stigma may be a factor in the apparent rise in problems they found in their research. It wasn’t necessarily just that more people were experiencing poor mental health, but that more people felt comfortable accessing services and reporting their experiences in surveys.
Nonetheless, they wrote, an increase in demand for mental health care and a rise in illness so severe it leads to missed work or education will result in “a legitimate concern about the pressures on public services.”
England’s public health and social care systems are already overburderned, and may not be prepared for such increases in need.
Experts at the U.K. mental health charity Mind are “deeply concerned” about increases in young people accessing disability benefits for mental health conditions.
Nil Guzelgun, Mind’s policy and campaigns manager, told Forbes that young people “have gone through a lot in recent years, with the pandemic disrupting their education, relationships, and prospects, and now they face the cost-of-living crisis as well.”
Many young people were struggling to attend school or work because of their mental health, she added, “so, it is sadly unsurprising to see that there has been such a rise in disability claims among this age group.”
The disparity between people with different educational backgrounds was also a major concern.
The U.K.’s benefits system “isn’t working for people with mental health problems,” she added.
Mind’s own research shows many people with mental health problems do not feel respected or adequately supported while navigating the country’s benefits system, for example.
The charity wants lawmakers to change the way welfare programmes work for disabled people in several ways. It wants the government to set up an independent regulator to help users challenge benefits decisions and launch a commission on welfare led by disabled people, among other policies.
Guzelgun said: “Mind is calling on the U.K. government to completely overhaul the benefits system [and] for more to be done to help people with mental health problems into work.”