Mental Health amongst the young – World Mental Health Day

Today is World Mental Health Day and Ashtons Legal are supporting this by sharing information which serves as a reminder to all of us to take stock of our own mental health but also of the people around you, in this case the younger generation.

Mental health and young people continues to make the news – earlier this year a school in Bury St Edmunds announced they were appointing a full-time psychologist to offer one-to-one support to students, but also to staff in identifying issues and advising on how to best help a young person with mental health concerns.

Data collated by the MindEd Trust shows that half of all mental illness first occurs first before the age of 14. Three quarters is established before the end of higher education.

Yet there is so little, and more often no provision for recognising young people under stress and reaching out to them before they become ill. Only six per cent of the mental health budget is spent on young people, and only three per cent of the national medical research budget is spent on mental health.

Far too many of the young people concerned go on to take their own lives, as I’m only too well aware. My job is often to represent their grieving families at the inquest, and then again perhaps later in a civil claim.

It’s easy to see why families so often feel they have to go to the law for explanations and apologies for what happened to their loved ones. One of our cases here at Ashtons Legal involved a young man who had already threatened suicide and was assessed as high risk. But it was more than two weeks after that first diagnosis before the NHS trust concerned got round to contacting him – by letter – proposing he attend a meeting a whole month after that… During that time he took his own life.

Another case involved a talented young man apparently with his whole life before him. He was due to go to Cambridge University. He didn’t get there. He took his own life on the railway tracks near his home. Nobody knows why.

We were previously involved in a conference at that same university, to try and find ways of bringing to an end this monstrous waste of young life. The pressures of school and university and the growing pains of adolescence and early adulthood can seem overwhelming for a young person trying to make sense of the world. We must recognize those pressures and do all we can to mitigate them.