COVID-19 has disrupted the lives of everyone, including children and young people, beyond recognition. So much so, that the proportion of children aged six to 16 with probable mental health disorders has increased from one in nine in 2017 to one in six in both 2020 and 2021. In this episode, we talked with Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Tamsin Ford, Professor of Health Neuroscience Paul Fletcher and behavioural epidemiologist Dr Esther van Sluijs about growing concern over the recent and widespread deterioration of adolescent mental health and what can be done about it.
We cover everything from the prevalence of mental health problems and eating disorders, sedentary behaviour and mentally passive activities, to how mental illness is represented in video games and how video games can be used to engage the public with mental illness in the right way. Along the way, we hear about mental health before and during the Covid-19 pandemic.
This episode was produced by Nick Saffell, James Dolan, Naomi Clements-Brod and Annie Thwaite.
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Timestamps:
[00:00] - Introductions
[01:05] - A bit about the guests’ research
[02:10] - How do we define and classify mental illness
[06:40] - Seeing mental health as a spectrum with wellbeing at one end and illness at the other
[09:00] - The criticism of the diagnostic process in psychiatry
[11:15] - The scale of the problem. How much mental ill-health is out there?
[12:10] - Concern around the fact that 1 in 6 people report experiencing a common mental health problem
[13:40] - This deterioration spreads across groups, gender, and ethnicity. Children from families facing financial or food insecurity or poor parental mental health reported worse mental health.
[14:50] - The role of the pandemic and the “medicalisation” of a normal reaction to a stressful and anxious situation.
[16:00] - Is it because more people are developing mental illnesses? Or is it because available services to help people have been reduced in recent years
[19:00] - Time for a recap!
[25:30] - The role of sedentary behaviour, physical activity and screen-based activity and how all of this interacts with mental health
[27:00] - The effect of sedentary behaviours and screen-based activities that are mentally passive.
[28:00] - The relationship between sedentary behaviour and eating behaviour
[29:50] - How has the pandemic affected physicality levels?
[34:45] - The role of physical activity in mental health and wellbeing?
[35:50] - Interventions. Treating depression through behavioural activation, which is a form of cognitive behavioural therapy.
[38:00] - We are social animals. The active part of social media, keeping in touch and interacting with friends and family can be a good thing.
[39:00] - Videogames, including Hellblade! And the representation of mental illness in video games. Paul’s experience of working with Ninja Theory and working with creative industries.
[42:15] - Impact - the feedback from the community who played the game and the response to the representation of psychosis in the...
