RAAC, the aerated concrete that turns out to be part construction material and part Aero bar, may be lousy at reinforcing school buildings. But it is pretty good at reinforcing the idea that very little is nowadays geared towards young people’s mental wellbeing.
After all, there is something perversely apt about the image of a classroom suddenly caving in. It serves as a neat visual metaphor for the tremendous pressures that children and students now face: like RAAC, their mental health is too often shot full of holes and perilously fragile.
The ongoing repercussions of the pandemic are perhaps the most obvious cause for concern. They have already damaged not just the learning but the life skills, social support mechanisms and emotional development of an entire generation.
Yet a number of issues have been disturbingly common since long before the advent of COVID-19. They include loneliness, isolation, independence, perfectionism and the detrimental effects of social media. Lockdowns and other recent hardships have only exacerbated them.
I first began to grasp the magnitude of these problems when I led a major project for the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It culminated in a high-profile campaign entitled What’s Up With Everyone?.
At the centre of the initiative was a series of five animated stories, each featuring a character affected by one of the mental health issues mentioned above. The videos were produced by Aardman, the studio behind the likes of Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and Chicken Run.
What’s Up With Everyone? was launched in 2021 and reached more than 17 million people in the first four months alone. This underlines that discussion of mental health among the young resonates to an enormous degree – for the simple reason that the phenomenon is so alarmingly widespread.
Not just the same old problems
It is true, of course, that children and students have always faced challenges of some kind. The current risk of places of education collapsing like a house of cards even has a direct parallel with my own experience in the mid-1970s.
The culprit back then was High Alumina Cement (HAC), which was particularly favoured in the manufacture of pillars. My desk at Birmingham’s St Philip’s Grammar School was right next to a padded HAC column, against which I would routinely nod off during dreadful history lessons.
Official recognition of HAC’s frailty eventually saw our class transferred to – where else? – a nuclear bunker. Hidden behind a splendid Edwardian mansion, this working facility felt very much like a place where hobbits might live – fittingly enough, as JRR Tolkien was our most celebrated ex-pupil.
Yet all this seems trifling, even laughable, in light of what youngsters have to deal with now. Although I hesitate to suggest we had it easy, I feel there is in many ways no comparison.
In a world defined by an injurious mix of hyperconnectivity and remoteness, a world of monumental peer pressure and crippling uncertainty, the young of today are confronted by challenges that we could scarcely have imagined. They are challenges that are not just near-relentless but genuinely unprecedented.
The importance of co-creating responses
Historically, the importance of mental health was at best gravely underappreciated and at worst completely unrecognised. The subject was essentially taboo, as a consequence of which those impacted – whether young or otherwise – were exposed to stigma, discrimination and even violations of their human rights.
It is now accepted that hundreds of millions of individuals have emotional or behavioural disorders. Crucially, it is also accepted that they require help. Good mental health is even acknowledged as a global objective – one that enjoys equal status with physical and social wellbeing in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Yet the gap between care needs and care provision remains considerable, especially for young people. Studies have found around half of all mental health conditions are established by the age of 14 and around three quarters by the age of 24. Shockingly, approximately 70% of adolescents do not receive appropriate interventions that could prevent continued problems in later life.
So where might the answer lie? Any solution will be multifaceted, like the issues it aims to tackle, but a valuable lesson that emerged from What’s Up With Everyone? is that the necessary responses must be co-created with the very people they aim to benefit – that is, the young.
The What’s Up With Everyone? team directly engaged with young people and drew extensively on their experiences and insights. In fact, young people were in many respects central to the team. They were absolutely critical to the direction and ultimate success of the project.
Needless to say, I cannot recall any such collaboration when my classmates and I were arbitrarily relocated to a subterranean bolthole almost 50 years ago. I also sincerely doubt anything similar occurred – at least on a meaningful scale – amid the mayhem of the pandemic or when the RAAC fiasco started to unfold.
As a society, we have finally learnt to talk openly about young people’s mental health. This is to be commended. But if we truly want to help them – if we want their difficulties to be reflected and addressed through policy and high-level decision-making – it would be a good idea to spend less time talking about them and more time actually talking with them.