If you missed all the headlines about the link between smartphones and the epidemic of mental illness in children and young people, then you have not been paying sufficient attention to your social media feed.
The demand for young people’s mental health services currently stands at record levels. It began around 2012, which saw a sharp uptick in rates of childhood anxiety, depression and self-harm. And since then, the graphs have continued their upward march. Even sceptical mental health epidemiologists like me, who prefer to look at data from several different sources before making up their minds, now believe that something serious is happening to our children.
Broader indicators of mental wellbeing, including loneliness, social isolation, and unhappiness, have been going downhill too. Strikingly, these changes have been reported across a range of widely dispersed Western nations, including the UK, the US, Nordic countries, Australia and New Zealand.
