Troubled teenagers need more help
As many parents know only too well, teenage daughters have become a lot more neurotic
The Prime Minister’s recent appointment of Jackie Doyle-price as the world’s first “minister for suicide prevention” smacks of gimmickry. It is certainly difficult to see how ministerial intervention might influence the complex and diverse mix of personal factors that leads someone to take his (or her) life – not least as the number of suicides has, for reasons unknown, been in steep decline for the past 30 years, with a third fewer than in the Eighties.
By contrast, the young have become much more troubled, and in two distinctive ways. Compared to just 10 years ago, five times more students in higher education seek help for mental health “issues” every year – reflecting their general loss of optimism about the future, compounded by limited job prospects, student debt, unaffordable housing and so on.
Then, as many parents know only too well, their teenage daughters have become a lot more neurotic, a quarter reporting being lonely or depressed, an additional 7,000 a year admitted to hospital with self-mutilation or having overdosed on pills and alcohol. As parents also discover soon enough, getting help for their troubled offspring is a frustrating business – ricocheting from one agency to another, lucky to find anyone prepared to take responsibility.
This is particularly regrettable as both groups respond well, almost surprisingly so, to psychological treatment such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and even a low-intensity psychosocial intervention focused on “increasing hope and working towards goals”.
Babylonian advice
Erstwhile classics lecturer and regular contributor to this paper, Dr Peter Jones, writing recently in The Spectator, draws attention to an interesting Babylonian precedent for readers proposing explanations (and better still, remedies) for perplexing symptoms. The Greek historian Herodotus (490-425 BC), when investigating the origins of the Persian Wars, was intrigued to discover that Babylonians had little time for doctors. Rather, when people fell ill, their families would carry them to the main square, where passers-by were required to inquire what was amiss.
“Anyone who stopped by the sick man’s side,” Herodotus writes, “had to offer recommendations for whatever the trouble might be, for which he has known to succeed with other people.”
And so it is with the most recent query from a gentleman afflicted virtually every night by an excruciating, if brief, pain from his foot to halfway to his shinbone, leaving him with residual discomfort as if having been “kicked very hard”. The general consensus is that this must be a variant of nocturnal cramp involving the flexor muscles to the foot, warranting preventive treatment with one or other of a range of anti-cramp remedies (quinine, pillow under the knee, corks in the bed, bed socks etc).
But Ian Weir, a retired orthopaedic surgeon from Fife, proposes the very different explanation of a compression syndrome affecting the sensory branch of the superficial peroneal nerve as it perforates the fascia halfway down the shin. The diagnosis is readily confirmed by injection of local anaesthetic. This may be curative – but if not, the outcome of a decompression operation is “very gratifying”.
Power of pilates
Finally, if coincidentally, three readers have each recently extolled the merit of a brief Pilates session every morning.
“I can now garden for hours and have just built my own pond,” writes one woman who was contemplating engaging a gardener; while one man found the exercises very useful on two counts – improving his balance and, if he does fall over, helping him to get back up.
Then another woman who originally took up Pilates to mobilise her stiff back reports it has also cured her irritable bowel syndrome. “I am finding out the meaning of regularity,” she writes.