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Dr Sebastian Kraemer |
The children of Thatcher and Major are suffering their errors
Dr Sebastian Kraemer argues that the seeds of stress and despair suffered by our young people were sown by the destructive government policies of the 1980s and 1990s
A Prince’s Trust survey of 2,000 people aged between 16 and 25 reports that 10 per cent did not find life really worth living, rising to 17 per cent of those not in employment, education or training.
This finding has been taken as evidence of their deteriorating mental state. But rising levels of stress and despair among British youth is not new.
A more rigorous study from the Institute of Psychiatry showed in 2004 that this has been going on since the 1980s.
In our hospital, the Whittington, we have seen more than a doubling of deliberate self-poisoning by adolescents in the past few years across all social classes. This is in line with national trends in self-harm.
Neither the Institute of Psychiatry nor the Prince’s Trust offered an explanation for this blight on these soon-to-be parents and citizens.
While feeling worthless is linked with repeated disappointments in intimate relationships – starting with the earliest bonds with our parents – social breakdown can tip the most vulnerable into despair.
We need more social, educational and clinical interventions to support young people and their families, but there are economic policies that could make a far bigger difference.
The subjects of the Prince’s Trust survey are Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s children who grew up during one of the most dramatic social changes in British history.
Despite the 1970s having a reputation as a dismal decade, Britain was then one of the most equal societies in the world.
The class system was less damaging than it is now because people could move up through education and employment.
The previous generation had less of a struggle, in particular less debt, but between 1980 and 2000 the UK rapidly became one of the most unequal states in the developed world, not far behind the USA.
In Holland, meanwhile, a 1997 study of child and adolescent mental problems showed little change over previous years, but the researchers did not observe that inequality in the same period had changed much either.
Mrs Thatcher effectively destroyed the working class, leaving those who could not buy their council houses in an isolated underclass without work or hope.
High inequality levelled out under new Labour but has not significantly fallen since.
This kind of chronic social breakdown is associated with more educational failure, teenage pregnancy, adolescent self-harm, substance abuse, violence, obesity, imprisonment, chronic stress and mistrust, large differences in child mortality between richer and poorer, and less social mobility.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s new book The Spirit Level, to be published in March by Allen Lane, gives detailed evidence of these trends. Though young people in urban gangs generate the most anxiety, the fact that inequality affects everyone has become blindingly obvious since the economic bubble burst.
Whatever our position none of us feels secure on a steep slope. And increasing unemployment – levels of which are always closely matched by depression and suicide – will bring many families sliding down.
Harriet Harman’s social mobility White Paper published on January 13, together with coherent government-led investment in green construction jobs and new profitable renewable energy technologies, could begin to make a difference.
Without explicit policies towards greater income equality worthy efforts at social improvement just wash away.
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