There seems currently to be an epidemic of mental illness in the UK, and it particularly affects schoolchildren. A recent parliamentary report suggests that 1 in 9 children suffers from a mental illness of some kind. For some reason this figure includes cases of ADHD, which (properly speaking) is not a mental illness but a form of neurodiversity.

ADHD was already recognised as a condition when I myself left school, although it was just called ADD then and not everybody in the education world believed that it was real, just as not everyone then believed in dyslexia. The cynics, many of them front line teachers, said that “ADD” was just a kinder way of saying “naughty disruptive boys” and that “dyslexic” was middle class English for “mentally retarded”. Recognising that some people’s brains really are wired differently, with different problems but also some compensatory advantages, has definitely been a step forward.

But until recently ADHD was no more common than other forms of neurodiversity like autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia. Now suddenly we have an explosion of supposed cases. Given that the basic wiring of your brain is probably determined before birth, it seems unlikely that there has been a large change in the frequency of this particular variant. More likely there has been a drastic change in certain people’s willingness to pin labels on children, and I suspect that the same is true of all these other supposed mental illnesses. Indeed children are now encouraged to google for labels that they can pin on themselves.

I remember that when I was at school, I was anxious about many things and frequently very unhappy, and many of the other children that I knew felt the same way. I was not impressed by grown-ups telling me that these were the best days of my life, and I remember once making a solemn promise to myself that, when I was a grown-up, I would never ever tell a child that. But I don’t think that any of us saw our problems as evidence that we were mentally ill, perhaps because we didn’t have the internet to tell us so.

The truth is that being a child sucks, or it did then. I actually think that modern children have it easier in many ways than we did. For a start you had to do whatever adults said — all adults, not just teachers and parents. And you couldn’t play your parents against your teachers, as children often do today, because in those days adults always backed each other up. We spent most of every weekday in school and much of what we learned there was boring. We were force-fed with facts. Now I am grateful for all the knowledge I acquired. Modern children are not expected to learn anything boring, which means in practice that they don’t learn much at all. There was a different attitude to bullying too. In the schools I went to, bullying never got as far as physical violence but it was unpleasant all the same, and you got very little sympathy if you complained about it to the teachers. They would just tell you to toughen up and learn to cope with things.

There was also a lot of anxiety which we considered well justified. We were anxious about failing tests, getting bad school reports (which would make our parents angry), putting on too much weight, being unpopular, growing excessively large breasts, not growing breasts when other girls seemed to be doing so, staining our skirts during a period, and maybe getting blown up by nuclear bombs. The last was an ever-present worry during the late 50’s and 60’s. I remember going to bed during the Cuban missile crisis wondering if England would still exist when I woke up in the morning. I suppose climate anxiety is the nearest equivalent to that for modern children, but global warming isn’t going to wreck anyone’s life overnight in the way that nuclear armageddon would do.

I was luckier than most of my contemporaries because I at least had a happy home life. My parents loved me and they did not believe in corporal punishment, perhaps because they were not English. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I got one on the backside, and it was only when I had done something that actually put me into physical danger and needed to be firmly discouraged from ever doing that again. Most children in those days were slapped a lot more often and this was entirely legal. I remember being dragged around shops by my mother and often seeing women screaming at their children (who were playing up because they were bored like me) and giving them a slap to drive the message home. Stories that I heard at school about other children’s home life also confirmed that I was one of the lucky ones.

So, all in all, we didn’t think that the way we felt about things was in any way wrong or abnormal. We were anxious and unhappy because life was tough, not because we suffered from diseases called “anxiety” or “depression”. At the same time, we were aware that it could have been much worse. England had been through a world war and a major bombing campaign. We had all seen and played on the bomb sites. We knew too that there was help available from the government for those who really needed it: unemployment pay, sick pay, national assistance and “old age pensions”. We knew from what our parents told us that these things had not been available for them back in the 1930’s. So however unhappy we were, we had good reason to think that it would pass and that the future would be better. Once we were grown up, we would have jobs and homes and would marry and have children (not that I ever wanted those but most of my friends did).

I wonder if young people today believe that they are mentally ill because that is the only possibility that gives them any hope of betterment. If you are not going to have a proper job (because all the production line jobs have moved to China and all the office jobs will soon be done by AI), if you will never be able to afford to buy a home of your own, if there is no real point in getting married because marriages no longer last for more than a year or two, if children are unaffordable because you need two full-time salaries to survive (and having children wrecks the planet anyway), then perhaps the only hope left is to believe that your hopelessness is a passing illness that can be cured by some new drug or electrical treatment.