As a single parent of a child with suspected autistic traits, I find Bridget Phillipson’s comments deeply unfair (Bridget Phillipson: parents must do more about bad behaviour and attendance in schools, 31 August).
Each morning can take me up to two hours just to get my daughter into school. Despite all my efforts, she is often absent due to severe anxiety. I am on my knees with exhaustion. The struggle makes it almost impossible to plan working days or earn a stable income, and I receive no benefits.
For more than two years I have tried to access child and adolescent mental health services support. We have only recently been accepted on to the neurodiversity pathway, yet face a further nine-month wait for assessment. In the meantime, there is no meaningful help. Our school does what it can, but cuts to children’s services mean families like mine are left to cope alone.
Parents are already doing everything possible. What we need is a government that acknowledges these realities and invests in proper special educational needs and disabilities and mental health support, not one that simply tells us to “do more”.
Katherine Green
London
Jeremy Hunt’s dismissal of vital support for disabled children as a “cash transfer” stings for parents, like me, who have disabled children (Overdiagnosis of children overlooks that growing up is ‘messy and uneven’, says Jeremy Hunt, 27 August). While other kids learn, play and have fun at their schools and nurseries, my deafblind son Harvey breaks down. We couldn’t get the funding for a nursery place that best meets his needs, so now he doesn’t eat, and gets so distressed he pulls out his cochlear implants.
Battling the system to find an appropriate nursery feels lonely and isolating, but in many ways it’s worse to know I am far from alone. Research from Sense, the national disability charity, shows almost half of parents with disabled children have struggled to find a school that meets their child’s needs, meaning there are thousands of children across the country missing out on the support and education they need to get the best start in life.
This isn’t about overdiagnosis or children not having enough “resilience” – it’s about cuts to public services that leave children like my son paying the price. This will have lifelong consequences.
Behind all this talk are real families like mine, desperate for more investment in this failing system, so children like Harvey can get the support they need.
Kimberly Hind
Clitheroe, Lancashire
Statements about overdiagnosis of mental health problems do not allow for different thresholds of distress. Some people can ride out symptoms, while others experience acute difficulty and despair. The shift in awareness and recognition of conditions, often perpetuated by social media, has helped to make certain labels fashionable and, along with the impact of some campaigns, there will be individuals who self-diagnose.
But there is ample evidence that there has been a worrying escalation in the number of young people, especially girls, with anxiety and depression, and a rise in hospital admissions for eating disorders, self-harm and attempted suicide.
It does not make economic let alone humane sense to underestimate too readily those who may be struggling in silence but need urgent help, as two-thirds of later and lifelong mental illness starts in adolescence.
Marjorie Wallace
Chief executive, Sane
Sally Weale’s article reflecting on overdiagnosis of mental health conditions in young people will touch many raw nerves, particularly in parents with teenagers. The debate as framed puts these parents between a rock and a hard place. While we want the best possible support for our children, we don’t want them to be labelled without good cause.
Framing the debate around diagnosis rates creates an illusionary binary model of health: either you are well, or you are not; either you have an anxiety disorder, or you don’t. The reality, however, is very different. We all sit on a continuum of cognitive and emotional wellbeing: we all have good days and bad days. However, crises apart, there is greater value in improving the wellbeing of everyone, especially for those at most risk.
Surprisingly, improving the wellbeing of the population as a whole also helps the most vulnerable. It reduces their vulnerability and in so doing reduces the number who need professional support. This not only reduces health service burden but increases accessibility for those at most risk.
An unlooked-for benefit of the mental health crisis in young people might be a national conversation on the kind of society we want, and how this can be achieved to the benefit of everyone.
Prof John Gallacher
Oxford
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