'The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic is International' and written by social psychologists Zac Rausch and Jonathan Haidt – published last year. Since 2010, in this country, hospitalisations for self-harm in girls aged between 10 and 12 have increased by 364 per cent. For boys the figure is 155 per cent.

These are not teenagers but children who have deliberately injured themselves by cutting with razors, scissors or other sharp objects, so severely they needed to go to hospital. That terrifying and tragic statistic alone should be enough to make us all sit up and ask: what on earth has gone wrong?

When an eleven-year-old child, who not so long ago might have been choosing stickers to decorate her notebook and writing in coloured felt tips, is slicing into her own arm with a pair of her mother's nail scissors because she hates who she is… that is not nothing. It is harrowing and unprecedented.

In case you are in any doubt that there is something seriously wrong, take note that in America, Australia, Canada and (worst of all) New Zealand there are similar spikes in serious self-harm among young females.For example, in America teenage girls are hospitalised for deliberately injuring themselves at three times the rate they were in 2010. Since 2012, increases in anxiety and depression in all five countries are off the scale.

Rausch and Haidt leave us in no doubt as to cause and effect.

Haidt is co-author of an important book called The Coddling Of The American Mind (2018). This argued that the US, Canada and Britain have seen a rise in the idea of 'safetyism', which displayed one of its worse manifestations in the shouting down of speakers deemed to be 'harmful' at universities.

Those students had been over-protected and indulged by their parents and teachers: they cried for 'safe spaces' because their minds had been coddled.

To quote Haidt: '[The] findings are momentous and should cause an immediate global rethinking of what children need to have a healthy childhood, and what obstacles to development arrived around the globe around 2012'.

 The Information Commissioner's Office has previously found that the data TikTok illegally harvested from children 'may have been used to track them, potentially delivering harmful content'.

Rausch points out that 55 other authoritative studies find a significant link between social media and mental health problems. If we just look back to those dates, and note the fact that incidences of depression, anxiety and self-harm rose steeply after about 2011, then the obvious question is why.

Rausch and Haidt lay it out with clarity:

1) A substantial increase in adolescent anxiety and depression rates begins in the early 2010s.

2) A substantial increase in adolescent self-harm rates or psychiatric hospitalisations begins in the early 2010s.

3) The increases are larger for girls than for boys (in absolute terms).

4) The increases are larger for Gen Z than for older generations (in absolute terms).

Then they ask the key question: 'Why did this happen in the same way at the same time in five different countries?'

Why does the situation seem to be worse for girls? Here, the Millennium Cohort Study followed 19,000 young people born in 2000 and found that teenagers became more depressed the more time they spent on social media - and the rates of mood disorder are far higher for girls than boys. In fact, boys who move from two to five hours of daily use see a doubling of depression rates. For girls the same increase triples.

Girls' friendships are more intense, but so is the pain they suffer when they fall out. Girls are far more susceptible to anxiety over appearance, especially in the social media world where people enhance their looks with filters, where 'influencers' with swishy hair and trout pouts become ideals to copy.

A survey by the Mental Health Foundation revealed 25 per cent of young people (13 per cent of boys and 37 per cent of girls) said celebrities have caused them to worry about their body image, and 19 per cent (10 per cent of boys and 28 per cent of girls) said TV shows caused them to worry about their body image. A survey of 11–16-year-olds found that over half of young people had experienced appearance-based bullying, with over half saying the bullying had started by age 10.

Add to that the ubiquity of the most vile online pornography and the effect it has on boys' behaviour towards girls; the pressure on girls to send sexy pictures of themselves and the terror that these will be shared; and hyper-sexualised 'Relationships, Sex and Health Education' lessons given in schools by highly-paid, unregulated providers claiming there are 74 different genders and that extreme sex acts are natural…

The pressure is enormous.

If they then have to cope with their first periods in 'gender-neutral' school toilets, knowing a boy might be listening… no wonder they collapse into a perfect storm of misery. No wonder they weep in silent confusion when the author of their beloved Harry Potter books is denounced as a 'transphobe' by bullies they dare not contradict.

For many liberals these dark realities are unacceptable because they challenge their assumptions. Common sense and parental concerns are decried as academics set out to prove there is no connection between mental health and social media – just as, for decades, liberal-Left commentators sought to disprove any link between screen violence and behaviour and the spread of pornography and attitudes to women.

It is hoped that the Online Safety Bill, which became law in October, will stop social media sites promoting self-harm content, as well as other extreme material, from pornography to suicide. But children will continue to be effectively coerced by the power of technology - for what child can resist? And what parent can fully understand that when they hand their beloved offspring a smartphone it can be like gifting a hand grenade?

Bel Mooney Article.