Mental health is too big a topic to cover in half an hour
Storm and Stress: New Ways of Looking at Adolescent Mental Health is a scholarly name for a radio programme. It sounds like a dry but impeccably researched scientific paper: the kind you would have to pay £85 to download from an academic publisher, if it weren’t being given away free by Radio 4.
I listened to Tuesday’s episode (the first of a three-part series) hoping to arm myself with science. My own children have yet to clear the hurdle of puberty. As presenter Dr Sally Marlow – a psychiatric researcher at King’s College London – reminded us, adolescence is a crucial time in human development, not least because it’s when the cracks start to show. Three quarters of people who suffer from mental illness during their lifetime start to develop symptoms before the age of 24.
Accompanied by the tinkling of sad piano music, Marlow assured us she would be asking rigorous questions about the psychiatric health of today’s young people, starting with the basics: “Are rates of mental illness really rising?”
“Everybody always assumes that things have got worse in mental health,” chuckled the eminent psychiatrist Dr Simon Wessely. For more than a century, he said, social commentators have been fretting that unhappiness is on the rise; and their reasons – academic pressure, social alienation, bad parenting – are always much the same. Yet for all that time, the underlying rate of mental illness in Britain has remained static. Scare stories about mental health, he suggested, often turn out to be expressions of anxiety about social change: hence the reports of hysteria and self-harm sparked by the first generation of female undergraduates.
But – he added, just as we we’re all starting to relax and laugh at our own silliness – BUT, in the past seven years, mental illness has suddenly become much more prevalent within one social group: young women aged 16 to 24. In this cohort (and no other), rates of anxiety and depression have lurched from 18 per cent to 26 per cent.
“How fascinating!” you, like me, are no doubt thinking. “What changed seven years ago to cause so much angst? And why only among girls?” Alas, your guess is still as good as mine. Dr Wessely’s interesting statistic proved to be the high point of this programme; after that, it wandered off absent-mindedly in all directions, alighting briefly in interesting places but never for long enough to dig down.
Even social media – surely the single biggest generational change in the lives of adolescents – got only a passing mention. Either Marlow and her producer forgot to ask all those interesting questions, or they ended up on the cutting room floor: mental health is a big subject to cover in three lots of half an hour.
But shortness of time doesn’t have to mean lack of substance. Each episode of SLICE: Politics and Personality (Radio 4) is only 15 minutes long. The brief – to examine not only how companies like Cambridge Analytica use psychological profiling to manipulate our behaviour, but also whether the science behind it actually stacks up – is ambitious. Yet the first episode, on Tuesday, rose to the challenge effortlessly. By which I mean, somebody clever put in a lot of effort.
That somebody – presenter and producer Jolyon Jenkins – managed to sketch out the history of personality testing within four minutes. Another five minutes to explain the science, and six more to pull it apart. (Why did psychologists settle on five key personality traits? Essentially, because it’s a number you can count on your fingers.) I would have liked the programme to be longer, but this time for the right reasons: not because it didn’t satisfy, but because it whetted the appetite.
Comedian Omid Djalili played host for the first episode of My Dream Dinner Party (Radio 4, Saturday), inviting five of his heroes round to his house for an imagined “evening of highbrow conversation and haute cuisine”. His dinner guests – Mo Mowlam, Kenneth Williams, David Bowie, Eartha Kitt and Mohammed Ali – were, of course, all dead, their discussions created by cutting and splicing old interview clips.
It was very nearly plausible. The aural scenery – doorbells ringing, coats being shaken off, food sizzling and drinks being poured – was immaculately painted. A deft script took the conversation in interesting directions. The only thing missing was the give-and-take of genuine dialogue. Celebrities never ask any questions. Their job, at least in interviews, is to talk ceaselessly about themselves. At a real dinner party, someone like that would be considered a crashing bore. You can get away with more when you’re famous and dead.