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“In the 1990s, I would have had one or two attempted suicides a year –
mainly teenaged girls taking overdoses, the things that don’t get
reported. Now, I could have as many as four a month.”
And it’s not, she notes, simply a question of her reputation as both a
practitioner and a writer drawing so many people to the door of her cosy
consulting rooms in west London where we meet. “If I try to refer
people on, everyone else is choc-a-bloc too. We are all saying the same
thing. There has been an explosion in numbers in mental health problems
amongst youngsters.”
The Care
Minister, Norman Lamb, has this week been promising a “complete
overhaul” of the system that deals with these troubled tweens and teens,
after a Department of Health report highlighted the negative impact of
funding cuts. And the three main party leaders have all made encouraging
pre-election noises about putting more resources into mental health services.
Yet, while the down-to-earth Lynn Evans welcomes the prospect of
additional funding, this divorced, Canadian-born mother of three grown
up children, isn’t convinced that it is the solution to the current
crisis.
The floodgates of desperate
youngsters opened, she recalls, in 2010. “I saw my work increase by a
mad amount and so did others I work with. Suddenly everything got much
more dangerous, much more immediate, much more painful.”
Official figures confirm the picture she paints, with emergency
admissions to child psychiatric wards doubling in four years, and those
young adults hospitalised for self-harm up by 70 per cent in a decade.
“Something is clearly happening,” she says, “because I am seeing the
evidence in the numbers of depressive, anorexic, cutting children who
come to see me. And it always has something to do with the computer, the
Internet and the smartphone.”
Issues such as cyber-bullying
are, of course, nothing new, and schools now all strive to develop
robust policies to tackle them, but Lynn Evans’ target is both more
precise and more general. She is pointing a finger of accusation at the
smartphones - “pocket rockets” as she calls them – which are now
routinely in the hands of over 80 per cent of secondary school age
children. Their arrival has been, she notes, a key change since 2010.
“It’s a simplistic view, but I think it is the ubiquity of broadband
and smartphones that has changed the pace and the power and the drama of
mental illness in young people.”
With a smartphone - as opposed
to an earlier generation of “brick” mobiles that could only be used to
keep in touch with worried parents - youngsters can now, she says,
“access the internet without adult supervision in parks, on street,
wherever they are, and then they can go anywhere. So there are difficult
chat rooms, self-harming websites, anorexia websites, pornography, and a
whole invisible world of dark places. In real life, we travel with our
children. When they are connected via their smartphone to the web, they
usually travel alone”.
She quotes one website that has come up
in conversations with youngsters in the consulting room. “I wouldn’t
have known about it otherwise, but it is where men masturbate in real
time while children as young as 12 watch them. So parents think their
children are upstairs in their bedrooms with their friends having
popcorn and no alcohol, yet this is the sort of thing they are watching.
And as they watch, they are saying, 'this is what sex is’. It is
leaving them really distressed.”
Mums and dads who allow young teenagers to have smartphones – and she
wouldn’t say yes until they were 14 - must also take a more active role
in policing the use of them, she says, however unpopular it will make
them with their offspring.
“I think children should have privacy
within their own rooms and in their diaries, and I think they should
have the Internet, but I don’t think they should have both, certainly
not until they have proved they are completely safe and reliable. So,
check their browser history, look at their Facebook, Instagram, and then
discuss it with them.
“When they are 15, you don’t, for
example, let them go to pub, or stay out in the local park at four in
morning, yet they’ll get into much less trouble physically there than
they will on their smartphones on the internet. I’m not talking about
paedophiles preying on them. I’m talking about anorexia sites and sites
where they will be bullied.”
That is where the damage is being
done to their mental health, she argues. Harmful, too, is the sheer
length of exposure to the virtual world via their smartphones that
youngsters have now. Her strong advice to parents is to limit access.
“Use it like parents used to use TV with their children. 'You can watch
this but you can’t watch that’, and there’s a watershed. We need that
kind of discipline.”
How about just banning it altogether? “I
believe that parents who don’t allow the Internet can cause as much
damaged as parents who allow too much. Their children are not able to
work and play and be with the rest of the children in the playground.
It’s has to be about balance, not banning.”
Living so much in a
virtual world has other negative consequences, she suggests. It gives
young users no time to reflect or learn about the consequences of their
actions. “So if you are having a WhatsApp chat with your friends, and it
all goes very wrong, you can say to them, 'I wish you were dead’. Now
perfectly nice children find themselves saying, 'I wish you were dead,’
because they haven’t got time to reflect, and then their words go
everywhere. Kindness, compassion, ethics, it’s all out of the window
when you are in this instantaneous gossip world with no time to think,
and no time to learn about having relationships.”
Parents also
need to think about what example they set their children by their own
attachment to their smartphones. “We know all about the importance of
childhood attachment and good healthy childhood relationships with
parents. Yet, if you look in the local park, you see children at a very
early age not getting the tender, intense love they used to because
their parents are always on their smartphones. Put them down, and be
with your kids from day one. They’re not getting what they need from us
to build up their core sense of self and that can create the problems I
see down the line.”
Julie Lynn Evans is, in one way, a reluctant
campaigner. She is keen to point out that this isn’t happening to all
children, and that there are other potential causes for the current crisis
– “results-driven school programmes”, busy parents and the recession
are three she quotes, not to mention “organic” mental health such as
schizophrenia.
And, she says, she has enough on her plate,
dealing daily with the current crisis in adolescent mental health,
without getting drawn into a broader argument about how to tackle its
root causes. Indeed, she confesses that two weeks ago she was so
exhausted that she even contemplated giving up work altogether.
“I was dealing with a young boy who had just jumped out of a car and run
into oncoming traffic. Two psychiatrists and I were tearing our hair
out trying to find a safe place to put him. We tried for four hours to
find him a hospital bed, and there was nowhere for him no hospital bed
available. He ended up going went home and we put in nurses 24 hours a
day, but not a lot of people are going to be able to do that. At the end
of it, I was so tired I thought I can’t go on”.
What makes her continue, though, in a system that even Normal Lamb has called “broken”, is that what she is witnessing frightens her. And she is speaking out because she believes the problem can be fixed.
She is emphatically not anti-internet, but rather anti- the negative
side effects of it on our young. “It is battering our children’s brains.
They have no times for the goodies in life – kindness, acceptance,
conversation, face-to-face, nature, nurture. They need to find a sense
of purpose by connecting with other people, not being on the Internet
all the time.”
If parents and schools engage with it openly and
together, this can be tackled, she urges. “If we can grab what’s going
on by the horns, and do something about it, then I am optimistic. I’m
not optimistic, though, if we just say it's the government 's fault and
we’ve got to have more money.”
