Are we truly preparing our children for their adult life?

“So your son didn’t go to school at all last year?” I ask the woman, aware this comes out “judgy”. We’ve only just met, and there must be more to it than the “he doesn’t like his teachers” this mother-of-an-absentee-teen proffered a few minutes ago. –

Gravely, she explains how after the first few months of her son refusing to go to school, the council got involved – and after that, the health professionals. “Anyway, we finally got a diagnosis.” Although I’m steeling myself for the bilge I smell coming, nothing prepares me for what she says next: “It turns out he’s suffering from Educational Avoidance.”

I’m so close to slapping her on the arm: “Ha! Oh, that’s good.” Because this has to be a joke? But already the smile is freezing on my face. Already, I know it’s not. And Google is po-faced as it explains the “curious rise” of this very real mental health condition – official name Emotionally Based School Avoidance – in both children and young people, and how symptoms of EBSA include “anxiety”, “low self-esteem”, “sleep disturbances” and… not wanting to go either to school, university, or indeed any space where there might be the threat of, you know, education.

I was reminded of this incident, which happened last summer, when I read the searing Sunday Times essay written by an anonymous UK-based academic at the weekend. “The Secret Lecturer” is desperately trying to teach – only to be thwarted at every turn by his students’ mental health diagnoses. By their generalised but all-consuming “Educational Avoidance”.

We may be only a month into the new university year, he writes, but already a third of undergraduates are absent from class, with “some too overwhelmed to take a bus to campus”, many so “socially anxious around other people” that they “avoid seminars” and others refusing to “come in because of panic attacks”.

In the emails this lecturer routinely gets explaining why they can’t possibly do any work, students will list their specific ailments, he says. “They’re suffering from ‘depression’, ‘extreme anxiety’ or ‘ADHD burnout’,” they assure him. Yet these statements are never backed up by medical fact, he writes, and how have we reached a point where people feel so comfortable casually self-diagnosing?

Well, that’s easy: mental health diagnoses, as my anecdote illustrates, are everywhere. Ten a penny. Inflated to the point of worthlessness. In the current climate, whatever your “ailment” is, you can probably always find some form of “health professional”, if not a doctor, to give it a label (that’s not “lazy” or “work-shy”). But the really great thing (for the pathologically lazy and work-shy) is that you no longer need to have any medical qualifications to hand out these diagnoses.

Whenever people lament the eyerolls that the words “mental health” now get, I’ll agree that it’s sad, before reminding them of this fact. Imagine, for a second, someone telling you that they had a blocked artery, a heart murmur or cancer, without ever having consulted a doctor. You wouldn’t waste another second on them. Yet every day, we accept that people have been given diagnoses from unqualified therapists (shockingly, there are no legal minimum qualifications to practise as a therapist or counsellor in the UK), from dangerously proactive teachers (if you’ve got no qualms telling a child they’ve been born in the wrong body, you’ll certainly feel comfortable pointing out their PTSD and OCD), from self-help books, from their friends – and from themselves.

Persistent absenteeism can obviously be prompted by real psychological problems, and I have no doubt that Covid will have seeded and exacerbated disorders such as anxiety in younger generations. I also believe that those generations have had their mental health imperilled by iPhones and social media to a degree that we have only just woken up to (and will fully understand only years from now).

But here’s the thing: ludicrous-sounding umbrella diagnoses aren’t going to help those in genuine need. Because all too often, slapping a trendy label on someone means “case closed”, and these people need individualised care – and then to get back to school, or university, or wherever they belong.

As for those who are consciously or unconsciously “trying it on” – and a lot of it will be unconscious, I think – we need to stop enabling them by fuelling cop-out culture. As “The Secret Lecturer” says in his essay, “promoting fragility is to their detriment” and will only leave them “unprepared for adult life”.