Sarah Harte: We seek diagnostic terms too often to address regular problems

The heretical thought that pops into my mind is whether there is any young person left in the country without an autism, ADHD, dyslexia, or anxiety disorder diagnosis

'We know that the pandemic, the smartphone, and social media are in the dock for our overly anxious offspring, but could another factor be that we are tacitly allowing our children to medicalise anxiety and translate every feeling into a mental health issue or personal deficit?'

It’s no surprise that clinical psychologist Dr David Coleman is on a nationwide tour this month helping parents to normalise anxiety for their offspring and reframe it as a normal part of life. The rise in child anxiety is both acute and alarming. We have an epidemic of anxious young people often self-diagnosing from social media sites like TikTok where much of the mental health content is misleading.

New findings published by researchers at the Royal College Surgeons in Ireland University of Medicine and Health Sciences indicate a marked increase in the prevalence of self-reported mental health problems among young Irish people.