Richard Hogan: Stop suggesting to children they're anxious — it's doing them no favours

Richard Hogan urges caution around the use of the language of mental health. Picture: Pexels

Out of all the modern issues facing our children, anxiety seems to be the one that grips them the most. Why is that? We have never had such awareness of mental health promotion in our schools, messages about mental health are ubiquitous. Is it time to stop and think about the messages we are giving our children?

I have been saying this for many years, children are incredibly suggestive and if we keep mentioning mental health issues to them, and what they could possibly be suffering with, we will have a surge in children presenting with dysphoria (a state of feeling unhappy, dissatisfaction or frustration.)

I’m not suggesting for a moment that we go back to the dark ages of mental health where people suffer in silence, or suffer unaware of what is happening to them, but I do think we need to reconsider the information we are giving our children. I had a teenage girl tell me recently in my clinic that she never heard of self-harm until someone mentioned it at a talk in her school and then she tried it. 

If I was to sit a group of teenagers down and tell them that a pain in your big right toe is the first sign of a heart attack, I know what will happen. The following day I will be greeted by some tired students who will tell me they didn’t sleep well because all during the night they had a pain in their big right toe. 

We are a species that is suggestive, that is why placebos have about the same rate of efficacy as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs). So, we have to be careful not to suggest dysphoria to our children.

Anxiety is caused when a perceived threat of an unknown future event is viewed consciously or otherwise by a person who believes they do not have the competency to meet that event. It’s like having a map and parts of it are missing and you have to get to your destination quickly, that would provoke an anxious response, because you would know you don’t have all the information to get to where you want. 

So, we have to teach our children they do have agency and they do have competency - that is the antidote to anxiety. But we all get anxious from time to time, that is a very normal human experience. 

This is where I find myself becoming incredibly frustrated by the mental health industry. It reminds me of the diet industry of the 90s, where many charlatans jumped on a very lucrative industry and did untold harm to innocent people attempting to lose weight. They had no credentials behind them and tried to sensationalise health by suggesting you can get "9 minute abs" or "Brad Pitt’s body for just €9.99".

That is why we have to be so careful about who we invite into our schools to talk about mental health issues. Students are often the ones in charge of mental health days in the school, and they invite whoever they would like to meet into the school to talk to classes about their own mental health issues. 

In my experience, this has all the potential to endorse mental health issues among our children. If you bring a minor celebrity into your school environment who talks about their negative experience of having a mental health issue, and leaves the students with the message, "make sure you talk about what you are experiencing" what have children learned? Nothing beneficial. In fact, this type of experience, for children, can have a deleterious impact on their mental health, as they come to think that to be like that person they have to suffer with the same issue. 

Bringing people into schools and talking about their mental health has the potential to endorse issues among our children. This all gives rise to a dangerous modern phenomenon that I have noticed in recent years, children think to be without a mental health issue simply makes them dull, boring and ordinary. Now that is dystopian, and we have to remove it from our children’s lives. 

When I’m talking with students about mental health, my message is very simply, "when you are feeling good, what are you doing? Do more of that". Not easy to monetise that message, and that’s why it isn’t pushed as much.

You cannot live without having anxious moments in your life - you are essentially endeavouring to live without a warning system that keeps you alive. Now, if that warning system is firing all the time, that needs professional intervention to figure out why it is in a heightened state and how to calm it down, and have a better relationship with it. 

But in my experience, we have to stop suggesting mental health issues to our children, we need the right supports in place so if they do experience something negative, they have all the supports they need. I think if we did this, we would have less anxious children.