If left to suffer, Britain’s depressed teenagers risk fuelling the next labour crisis

Companies must make the next generation of workers their priority, or face the economic consequences

Another week, another poll showing how depressed Britain’s teenagers are. The charity Parentkind has surveyed 1,000 teenagers to find out how smartphones continue to affect them, and the results are devastating. Almost one in five of the 16 to 18-year-olds surveyed said they felt life was not worth living because of social media, while four in 10 thought their school grades had been affected and almost half of the teenage girls polled felt pressure to change their looks. Ofcom, the media regulator, is trying to crack down on the damage being done to under-18s online, but the parents of children who have died after being exposed to harmful digital content argue that its ideas are insufficient. Britain’s teenagers are in much more urgent need of help.

Smartphones are not solely to blame – there are many country-specific issues that feed the problem. It is notable that the UK was placed close to the bottom of a mental well-being index earlier this year, with Uzbekistan the only nation to rank lower. The Children’s Commissioner for England has warned that more than 270,000 children and young people referred to children’s mental health services in 2022-23 were still waiting for support at the end of that period. Drastic public sector cuts and a cost of living crisis have raised stress levels in UK households, with mental health charity Mind recording a 40pc increase in the number of calls to its helpline in relation to financial worries in the summer of 2022. Britain’s economy might now be picking up, but few families will feel it is “going gangbusters”, as the UK’S statistics office put it on Friday. Unable to find help, troubled teenagers will retreat further into the virtual world. This is the next generation of scientists, inventors, chief executives and politicians. The whole economy will suffer if teenagers are left to suffer from anxiety and depression.

A Labour donor tells me that he thinks more businesses need to wake up to this issue, a point he will no doubt be discussing with the party as he signs the next cheque.

More support is needed from the private sector to reduce waiting lists for mental health services, tackle the problems surrounding social media, improve education and encourage physical activities. More than two in five children in Year 6 are also now overweight or obese. Future problems can be spotted in the classroom. An experienced high-school teacher tells me how she suspects some of the issues her and her colleagues deal with at work will end up becoming an employer’s problem. “Some students are so focused on potential careers and are such high achievers that it affects their mental health. Others are very disillusioned with no aspirations who have little motivation.”

As she puts it, UK plc needs to pay attention because companies are going to be inheriting these young people. Not only could a disengaged or overly stressed workforce reduce effectiveness, the influence of social media could turn young people off entire industries completely as they chase glitzy-looking jobs that seem popular online instead. “From a career point of view, social media can mislead some to believe that they’re just going to become an influencer and should just care about ‘likes’ and getting rich,” the teacher adds. “For others it might put pressure on them to demonstrate certain levels of success. What they consume on social media to do with careers is all linked to having money to live a certain lifestyle”. That desire for online fame was evidenced during the pandemic, when hundreds of wannabe influencers aged between 17 and 21 auditioned to live in the UK’S first “Tiktok house” in Uxbridge, Middlesex, to chase their dreams of stardom and wealth. “I haven’t seen a friend in five months,” said one resident of the house, who left her family home in Portugal to make a name for herself. “The effort that [other teens] put into their friends, we put into our work.”

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has published a book on why smartphones are causing mental illness in children, believes that social media has “rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale”.

The invention of the smartphone was initially one of the greatest inventions of humankind with no negative impact on our mental health, Haidt told

The New Yorker last month, but then it changed from being our servant to being our master. He points out that it wasn’t until around 2012 and 2013, a few years after Instagram, push notifications and the front-facing camera came out, that mental health started to really fall off a cliff.

The UK’S Health Foundation think tank says mental illness has increased more than fourfold among 16 to 34-year-olds over the past decade. Social media use for 16 to 17-year-olds is at around 95pc, according to Ofcom.

The tech giants that created such addictive products already know that they need to do more – they are legally obliged to abide by terms such as setting age limits, and Ofcom now wants to introduce tough new age checks – but the business community as a whole needs to accept that this is their problem too. Britain’s teenagers have been down for a while. There’s no point in bosses pretending that they haven’t noticed.