Growing pains

We might grumble, somewhat ignorantly, about the dismaying effects of social media and mobile phones on the younger generation. But oldies are fully justified in being alarmed by soaring levels of anxiety and depression among their teenage children and grandchildren.

Even if you’re rich, there aren’t nearly enough therapists equipped to deal with anorexia, self-harm, addiction and other serious illnesses and problems.

For those unable to afford private health care, the NHS has CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services). Having attempted to navigate them myself, I know waiting lists are lamentably long. Fewer than 40 per cent of young people can access mental-health support.

This severe, nationwide crisis has escalated partly because UK health research allocates just 5.5 per cent of its budget to investigating it, four times less than it does to cancer research.

And treatment for young people is based mostly on research in adults. No one has the answers or even seems to know the right questions to ask. The current curriculum fails to address the problem in the classroom.

There is, however, cause for hope with a new initiative, reassuringly led by scientists at Oxford University. BrainWaves, run by a Scientific Steering Group, chaired by John Gallacher, Professor of Cognitive Health at Oxford, is a creative, transformative response to the crisis.

It comprises the largest, most comprehensive ever study of wellbeing of 50,000 students aged 11-19, hosted by the University of Swansea. Any oldies frustrated by incomprehensible and ineffectual waffle will be relieved to see such sturdy academic foundations, summed up by the BrainWaves strapline, Healthy Young Minds through Science.

The programme has been developed

Henry Wallis’s The Death of Chatterton

in tandem with The Day, the leading publisher of news and critical literacy content for secondary schools. Again, how heartening that an outfit that genuinely cares about literacy is involved. The Day publishes an online daily newspaper for young people, encouraging debate about serious contemporary issues. It also creates teaching resources and lessons, which it delivers to schools – as the name suggests – daily.

The BrainWaves remit is to gather an unprecedented amount of reliable data on teenagers in a thoroughly ethical way. It then uses all Oxford’s scientific might to analyse it and produce effective, empirical, therapeutic interventions and educational resources at scale.

They will create lessons, free to every school, that will include analysis of the teenage brain, sleep, nutrition and diet, stress and anxiety, resilience and the role of research.

The result will be a research-based curriculum, firmly rooted in science, that provides important knowledge about wellbeing and mental health.

The ultimate aim is to build a complete programme of free mentalhealth education, firmly rooted in science, ensuring that schools become environments in which students can thrive emotionally as well as mentally.

In September, full recruitment for the study begins. But it’s already taken three years of painstaking research and academic groundwork to launch this ambitious project.

It’s been possible only thanks to funding raised by a group of founding friends and many concerned parents, led by Princess Dora Loewenstein, herself an Honorary Member of the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford. In just a year, private individuals and family foundations donated £1 million.

Now these friends have rallied and laid on on a spectacular fundraising dinner, at Bridgewater House overlooking Green Park, attended by an array of politicians and concerned individuals.

The house has been in the hands of the Latsis family since 1981 and is not open to the public, though its well-known façade has appeared as Marchmain House in Brideshead Revisited and Grantham House in Downton Abbey.

Sarah Montague, long-time presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme and The World at One, spoke movingly at the event. As a mother of four girls, she is well aware of the challenges facing the younger generation and how they seem to be struggling with an epidemic of anxiety and depression.

As she says, ‘Something is happening with our children. We need to know what. That’s what BrainWaves is about – providing research that is long overdue.’

So far, there have been no solutions or adequate co-ordinated responses to the dramatic escalation of this crisis. But now the technology, experts and scientists are in place and poised to begin the next phase of the research process.

The dinner raised close to half a million and if money continues to be raised, this could be the breakthrough that transforms the entire teenage mental-health landscape.

We can only welcome and applaud such a concerted, gigantic step – not before time – that our top scientists are finally taking.