Young people demand mental health medication despite being ‘not that ill’ – peer
Baroness Fox of Buckley said attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has become the ‘fashionable disorder’.
Young people are demanding medication to treat their mental health issues, despite being “not that ill”, Parliament has heard.
Baroness Fox of Buckley, a former Brexit Party MEP, said attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has become the “fashionable disorder of the day”.
There was an 18% rise in prescriptions for ADHD drugs between April 2023 and March 2024, the non-affiliated peer said.
“Isn’t it tragic that so many people want their children, or want themselves, to have these drugs in order to feel that they can cope? When they’re actually, really, not that ill, or not ill at all, but they’ve got the label,” she added.
As peers scrutinised the proposed Mental Health Bill, which aims to overhaul existing legislation, Lady Fox argued the increased demand for medication could cause councils to go bankrupt and for schools to “collapse”.
In the House of Lords, she said “therapeutic experts, councillors and psychological practitioners” are becoming “diagnostically trigger happy in labelling people as ill”, which she argued is driving up demand for treatment.
The peer added: “That often leads to a clamouring, especially amongst younger people, for pills to help them cope with the travails of life, and this is being egged on in some way by the therapeutic practitioners.”
Lady Fox continued: “At the Academy of Ideas, we had a debate on young people and mental health and these kind of issues, and the audience was largely young people who said that the problem was that psychiatrists and GPs and doctors wouldn’t listen to them and wouldn’t believe them that they’re mentally ill, they demanded treatment, and they were quite aggressive.
“And it was kind of one of those, you know, young people saying ‘where are my tablets’. And I thought, life has changed slightly. And it was the psychiatrists in the room who were trying to hold the line and gently suggest maybe they weren’t ill.
“And that led to even more hysterical reaction – ‘how dare you say that I’m not ill’.”
Lady Fox is the founder of the think tank Academy of Ideas, which describes itself as being “committed to organising free and open public debates”.
In the Lords, she continued: “ADHD is the fashionable disorder of the day, and there are huge numbers of students and school pupils demanding that their neurodevelopmental disorder is recognised and catered for.
“In my view, it’s often diagnosed promiscuously and it’s leading to huge demands that I think are actually detrimental to education, by the way. It’s likely to make councils go bankrupt and schools collapse.”
Lady Fox also argued the Bill could lead to “people queueing up to point the finger” at mental health practitioners, due to the current “complaints culture”.
Baroness Murphy said she believed people were being diagnosed with mental health conditions when they were in fact in “distress”.
Lady Murphy said she was aware of people who self-diagnose themselves with mental illness from online surveys.
She said she and her husband had done a questionnaire on Wednesday morning, which said they both had ADHD.
“Well maybe I am folks, but I’m not going on the Ritalin yet,” she said.
Lady Murphy had a long career as a psychiatrist and academic, including 13 years as a professor of old age psychiatry at the University of London at Guy’s Hospital and six years as vice chairman of the Mental Health Act Commission.
The independent crossbencher told peers: “There’s no doubt that there is massive overdiagnosis of things that are called mental disorder but are distress and need a different sort of approach.
“One of my own young friends, a gentleman who is in his final years training as a maxillofacial surgeon, has had a period of great distress, because of family circumstances.
“He sat down one evening and went to this website, called Diagnose Yourself. He rang me up and said, ‘I’ve been diagnosed as having ADHD’. Well, I cannot imagine anybody who is less likely to have ADHD than this young man, who is the most socially competent man I know.
“So, this morning I got on the website myself, and I had a go at doing it. My husband and I did it together, and we both came up with ‘You are probably ADHD’.”
She added: “There are a lot of websites which are utter rubbish, and are encouraging people to pay money to see psychotherapy, psychotherapists and other counsellors to see what’s the matter with them, and pay money so other people can put money in their pockets for doing not much.”