Mental health: Wes Streeting jumps on ‘overdiagnosis’ bandwagon

Adults have often struggled to know how to treat teenagers, said The Mail on Sunday. But today the problem seems particularly acute.

An increasing number of adolescents and younger children are being told, while still at school, that they suffer from “conditions” that require therapy or pills. “With surprisingly little resistance or opposition, treatments such as the prescription of stimulant drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have become normal and uncontroversial for children as young as five, and much more so in higher age brackets.”

It seems that everyday problems, such as anxiety, disappointment and exam stress are increasingly being medicalised. “Is this really justified? Is it at least far too widespread?”

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

‘A national sport’

The Health Secretary Wes Streeting certainly seems concerned: he has ordered an independent review into the reasons for a rising demand for mental health, ADHD and autism services in England, in particular among young people. So Streeting has jumped on the “overdiagnosis” bandwagon, said John Harris in The Guardian.

“Questioning other people’s needs” seems to have become almost “a national sport”: those with mental health or neuro-developmental conditions must be malingerers and spongers. But there are reasons why more people, and particularly the young, are being diagnosed with anxiety and depression. There are the “still-overlooked” effects of the pandemic; the fact that work is increasingly precarious and hard to come by for the young; help is very hard to find on the NHS.

As for diagnoses for autism and ADHD, which are entirely different conditions, they have also risen, but also for good reasons. The definition of autism was widened in the 1980s and 1990s: it is now universally accepted that it exists on a spectrum. ADHD, meanwhile, is something we are only starting to understand. The accusation of overdiagnosis offers a simple solution to rising cases: just tell people “to be more resilient, and wave them away”.

‘Devastating’ rise

Come on, said Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times. About 15% of the working-age population now reports a long-term mental or behavioural condition. Between 2019 and 2024, the number of 16- to 34-year-olds off work with mental health conditions rose “by a nationally devastating, and socially tragic, 76%”.

Between 2019 and 2021, there was a 3,200% increase in the number of British women taking online ADHD tests. Obviously, some overdiagnosis is going on, with worrying results. Dismissing the idea out of hand makes no sense. It’s good that society “has become kinder to those with mental health conditions” – but it’s also clear that some “have forgotten” what these actually look like.