(UK) Mental health crisis: Is it just "normal childhood experiences?"

June 29, 2026, Conservative Post:  If One in Ten Children Need a Diagnosis, Perhaps the Problem Isn't the Children

The number of children being referred for ADHD, autism and anxiety assessments continues to rise at an extraordinary rate. While genuine mental health conditions deserve proper support, the growing medicalisation of childhood raises important questions. Are Britain’s children becoming less healthy, or are we increasingly defining normal childhood experiences as disorders?

When around 10 per cent of people are left-handed, nobody considers left-handedness a disorder. It is simply recognised as part of the natural variation of human beings.

Yet when we are told that one in ten children now has an active referral to mental health services, our immediate assumption is that something must be wrong with those children.

Perhaps we should pause and ask a different question. What if something is wrong with the way we are defining normal childhood?

According to new figures highlighted by the Children’s Commissioner, more than one million children in England were actively engaged with, waiting for, or referred to mental health services during the year to March 2025. Referrals for suspected autism rose by 47 per cent in a single year. Referrals for other neurodevelopmental conditions, including ADHD, rose by almost a quarter.

These figures are often presented as evidence of an epidemic. But are they?

From a medical perspective, rising diagnoses do not automatically mean rising illness. The report itself acknowledges that increased referrals may reflect improved recognition, greater awareness, changing help-seeking behaviour and what it describes as the “medicalisation of distress”.

That phrase deserves far more attention than it is receiving. Children have always struggled to sit still. Children have always daydreamed in lessons. Children have always been impulsive, emotional, distracted and energetic. Children have always worried about friendships, exams, fitting in and what others think of them.

These behaviours are not new. Childhood itself has not fundamentally changed.

What has changed is our willingness to place diagnostic labels on an ever-wider range of human behaviours.

This does not mean ADHD is not real. It absolutely is. Severe ADHD can be life-altering and deserves proper recognition and treatment.

Nor does it mean autism is not real or that anxiety disorders do not exist. The danger lies elsewhere.

The danger is that we increasingly view ordinary struggles through a medical lens.

The child who cannot concentrate for six hours in a classroom may have ADHD. Equally, they may simply be a child.

The teenager experiencing anxiety may have a clinical disorder. Equally, they may be reacting entirely normally to social media pressures, family breakdown, academic stress and a world that increasingly tells them they should be worried about everything.

Medical professionals have long recognised the risk of over-diagnosis. A diagnosis can be enormously helpful when it identifies genuine illness. But when labels become the primary route to support, there is a natural incentive for parents, schools and even health services to seek them.

The Children’s Commissioner’s report hints at precisely this problem.

Parents know that obtaining additional educational support often requires a diagnosis.

Schools facing stretched budgets often need formal assessments before resources become available.

In such circumstances, the system effectively encourages medicalisation.

The result is a growing number of children being defined by conditions rather than understood as individuals.

There is another uncomfortable question. If one in ten children is now being referred to mental health services, and referrals continue rising year after year, is it really plausible that we are witnessing an unprecedented explosion of neurological disorders?

Or are we witnessing the consequences of modern lifestyles that leave children less active, less independent, less resilient and more connected to screens than any generation in history?

A century ago, childhood involved freedom, outdoor play, risk-taking and face-to-face social interaction.

Today many children spend hours scrolling through social media, consuming endless digital stimulation and comparing themselves with carefully curated online lives.

Perhaps it should not surprise us that attention spans suffer and anxiety increases.

The answer may not always be another diagnosis.

It may sometimes be less screen time, more exercise, stronger families, better sleep, healthier diets, more outdoor activity and a culture that allows children to experience setbacks without immediately assuming they are unwell.

Of course genuinely vulnerable children need support. Nobody should deny treatment to a child suffering from serious mental illness.

But neither should we rush to define every childhood difficulty as a medical condition.

The challenge facing Britain is not simply a mental health crisis. It may also be a crisis of expectations.

Children are not miniature adults. They are supposed to be restless. They are supposed to make mistakes. They are supposed to struggle with concentration sometimes. They are supposed to experience disappointment, frustration, day dreaming, boundless energy, distraction and even worry.

Those experiences are not necessarily symptoms. Sometimes they are simply part of growing up.

Before we conclude that an entire generation is becoming mentally ill, perhaps we should first ask whether we have forgotten what normal childhood looks like.