You expect your child to come home from school with a grazed knee, a head full of nits, or someone else’s PE kit. What you probably don’t expect is a fresh diagnosis of anxiety, ADHD, or gender dysphoria when there were no signs before. And yet, according to a new report from the Family Education Trust, a staggering one in five British schoolchildren now carries a label of neurodivergence or mental illness — double the already dubious figure from a decade ago.
So what’s going on? Report author and counsellor Lucy Beney says that rather than toughening kids up to deal with the challenges of life, today’s schools may be talking them into fragility.
Every school is now required to appoint a “Senior Mental Health Lead”, and there’s cross-party enthusiasm for parachuting therapists into educational institutions. By 2023, over a third of schools had signed up with Mental Health Support Teams (MHSTs), and though the Department for Education doesn’t routinely collect data, a 2017 survey suggested that around 85 per cent of secondary schools and 55 per cent of primary schools were already offering counselling services.
This shift is amplified outside the classroom, as social media picks up where school counsellors leave off. On TikTok mental health labels like anxiety and depression, or conditions like ASD, ADHD are used as social capital — with young people trading symptoms like status symbols.
It’s increasingly hard to avoid the conclusion that these battalions of school-based therapists — many of whom are likely to be unqualified or still in training — are not curing childhood malaise but cultivating it. What’s marketed as support begins to look like indoctrination into a cult of vulnerability. Kids are taught to pathologise everyday emotions and rebrand quirks of personality as evidence of neurodivergence.
Beney urges us to consider not just the psychological phenomenon of social contagion — the spread of beliefs and behaviours through peer groups — but also the financial interests at play. Behind the cooing promises of person-centred care and compassion is a lucrative market. Schools pay for apps, teacher training, lesson plans, and branded wellbeing worksheets. And then there’s government money.
In 2017, the Government pledged £1.4 billion over five years for children’s mental health. By 2023–24, projected spending had ballooned to £1.1 billion in a single year.
This has not gone unnoticed by charities, some of which have done quite nicely from the panic around youth mental health. In the year to March 2023, Mind took in £59 million, Rethink Mental Illness £40 million, and Young Minds £6 million. Much of this isn’t from fun runs or collection tins — it’s straight from the taxpayer’s pocket. Of Rethink’s £40 million, almost £24 million came from 105 government contracts, plus another £193,000 in grants. Meanwhile Barnardo’s runs 12 of the government’s MHSTs.
Add to that the extra funding schools receive for pupils with Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), and Disability Living Allowance (DLA) available to individuals, and an incentive emerges. As Beney observes, “For some families, there is a clear financial benefit in having a child diagnosed with a ‘disorder’ which can be classified as a ‘disability’.”
Perhaps the problem is less what young people are feeling — and more what they’re being told those feelings mean
None of this is to deny that children today face real pressures. In the past two decades, smartphones, pornography and social media have rewired the way young people relate to the world and themselves. And as with every major technological shift — from the written word to the printing press — there has been a period of confusion and cultural instability. But still, we have to ask: if previous generations endured wars and genuine trauma without mass diagnoses, why are today’s teens falling apart over TikTok?
Perhaps the problem is less what young people are feeling — and more what they’re being told those feelings mean. The new orthodoxy tells them that all struggle is trauma, that happiness is a human right and that victimhood is virtuous. But resilience isn’t built through mindfulness or finding conditions to hide behind. It’s built by growing up, messing up, and learning that life’s rough patches don’t always require a label or a prescription.
Nearly 50 years ago, philosopher Ivan Illich warned that institutions often end up perpetuating the very problems they aim to solve. His sharpest critiques were aimed at education and healthcare, writing that “schools teach the need to be taught” and “modern medicine makes more people sick than it heals.” Today, as anxious children are funnelled into school-based counselling his insights seem more relevant than ever.
If we’re serious about helping children thrive, we need to challenge a culture that teaches them to fear their own feelings — and question an industry that profits when they do.
