Jane Graham has been a school nurse for nearly 20 years – and during this time the nature of her work has completely changed.
I'd be surprised if that wasn't the case, frankly....
"When I started, the majority of the support we provided was for physical health, like asthma, allergic reactions and injuries," she says. "Now it's mental health." She has seen a surge in schoolchildren struggling.
"It really impacts pupils at secondary school, but some are as young as seven," she explains. "We're seeing children with depression, anxiety and stress – and that's leading to panic attacks, self-harm and eating disorders. They're not making it to school or are so anxious they cannot attend classes."
Why is this being tolerated? Is it bad parenting?
What's less clear is why this is happening now.
Well, actually, there are some people for whom it's not such a mystery.
Plenty of explanations have been offered by experts: the pandemic, the cost of living and the advent of social media have all placed additional pressures on the generation now starting out. But some experts in the field of mental health have raised another question: that is, is there really a mental health crisis or are young people simply not resilient enough?
This question is a polarising one. The word resilience could be interpreted by some as disparaging, or even toxic, in a similar vein as the term "snowflake generation". But one of the country's leading experts in child and adolescent psychiatry, Prof Andrea Danese, from King’s College London, believes that resilience needs to be taken seriously. While greater awareness of mental health "has generally been a positive thing", according to Prof Danese, who is general secretary for the European Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, he says that he is concerned that it may also have "inadvertently contributed to over-pathologising distress in young people".
I suspect this is spot on, as it's always been a truism that what you tolerate, you will get more of.
Ms Graham, the school nurse, is also of the opinion that many children who she has seen struggling - particularly those with more low level mental health problems - would benefit from becoming more resilient. She believes that if they were equipped with better coping skills, young people would likely be better placed to deal with the challenges they may be facing before they develop into a full-blown crisis – and this in turn would help ease the pressure on services to focus on those who are at high risk of harm. "We need to do much better at teaching resilience in schools and how to stay mentally healthy," she says. "But the way we treat children, such as primary school sports days where everyone is declared a winner, doesn't help."
Who has been saying this for decades? Oh, right. Us!
