Throughout their school lives, many teens report that their stress levels are way above what is considered healthy - reports from teens way exceed those of adults on a calculated average. Even more so, rates of depression and anxiety amongst teenagers have increased by 70% in the past 25 years – meaning 75% of mental illnesses begin before the age of eighteen. These factors lead to students eating unhealthily – both over and under eating – and getting much less than the hours of sleep recommended by The National Sleep Foundation. People who experience high levels of stress, and the repercussions, face high levels of grouch, nervousness, and often feel overwhelmed with what they are faced with in day to day life.
Reasons for this great increase in mental wellbeing decline in young people include things such as the suffering of mental healthcare. People often need to wait long periods of time to receive care from the NHS, as well as the hindering of therapy and specialists, meaning proper diagnosis of mental illnesses aren’t as readily available, nor adequate care for those in need.
As well as this, research for mental health is generally underfunded – in 2014, the government gave the research society £112 million, leaving £8 for each of the 15 million people affected by mental illnesses in the UK. A small portion of this fund is used to focus of mental illness in young people.
Moreover, mental illness has a huge negative stigma – even more so when surrounding adolescents. Young people are rarely taken seriously when mental illnesses are involved – they are often told to be overreacting, and are the punch line of jokes. Not being taken seriously can actually impact teens’ mental health further in some cases.
To improve mental health amongst teens, it is important for the care supplied to the mentally ill to be improved and for those in need to be more aware of what is available to them, so they can therefore take their own initiative and improve upon themselves. Furthermore, the funding, I believe, should be distributed much more evenly across the health system so that everybody can benefit from the money. And, of course, the stigma surrounding mental illnesses needs to be broken down so that people aren’t afraid to acknowledge their problems or have them properly diagnosed and treated.
