Is knife crime all down to hormones?

EACH year there is a new batch of adolescents, some noticeably doing stupid things, around the time they leave school. To my mind, this coincides with some not being able to understand or deal with their recent hormonal changes. Most young people are fine until they hit puberty, but thereafter some have real problems with it. For males, they can become more aggressive and females can become irrationally moody. They generally seem to know about the physical changes to be experienced, but I wonder if they are told about the considerable mental changes and how to recognize and deal with those? Hormone changes can make people unwittingly mentally unwell and this seems not only true for those going through puberty, but also those at menopausal age.

I wonder how much effort is put into teaching young people how to deal with all of this, and what to expect from it? It seems that we all just shrug our shoulders and expect that there will be problems and that they are to be endured. Should there be more medication to help so that people going through puberty do not become so scared by the changes and may not get stressed out by it at all? Medication such as HRT might be more effective, as opposed to the often prescribed anti-depressants.

I suggest all of this because it could be that problems with hormones form the basis of the recently reported knife and other violent crimes, particularly among those in adolescence. Sue Cassidy,

by email