Helping young people deal with their emotional problems is not only important to enable them to process trauma, but it could save the NHS hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in the future.
The high cost of adolescent mental health challenges has been revealed in new research from the London School of Economics Care Policy and Evaluation Centre.
Researchers found that conduct and emotional problems in teenagers today could end up burdening the NHS with a £630,000 annual bill just for GP services when they become adults.
Dr Derek King, assistant professorial research fellow at the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre, said: “Our figures foreshadow the true costs of mental health to the NHS.”
The report, which was published in the journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, analysed data of three groups of people born in 1946, 1958 and 1970.
Researchers managed to predict how many GP appointments the current cohort of adolescents would require in the future based on analysis of this data.
They determined that those with both emotional and conduct problems will require 6,500 visits a year by the time they are 50. An extra 3,200 GP appointments a year will be needed for conduct problems, while 6,300 per annum will need to be available for emotional issues.
Dr King noted: “Our figures foreshadow the true costs of mental health to the NHS. While we only estimate the costs to GP services, we know that many of these visits will lead to a referral to another specialist.”
Therefore, the true cost to the NHS will be much higher.
According to the researchers, adolescent girls may end up seeing their GP more than males in the future.
This could be due to experiencing greater anxiety than boys in their teenage years or women still having concerns or worries about their health due to their fragile state of mind.
This comes after charity YoungMinds reported annual referrals to young people’s mental health support has increased by 53 per cent over the last three years.
There were more than 1.2 million referrals to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) in 2022, with a substantial proportion of these still yet to be treated.
In comparison, just over 800,000 young people were referred to CAMHS in 2019, prior to the pandemic.
Tom Madders, director of communications and campaigns at YoungMinds, said: “This explosion in referral numbers has led to wait times being as long as two years in parts of the country.”
He stated this was partly due to a lack of staff, adding that the government needs to increase the number of mental health specialists who can work with young people.
According to the charity, more than half of adolescents are worried about money, and 28 per cent are still dealing with the effects of the pandemic.
These include anxiety about the future, bereavement, loneliness, low self-confidence, anger and grief for lost opportunities or missed events, and nervousness about social gatherings.
No parent wants to see their child suffer, so consider booking to see a therapist in West London who can talk through your child’s emotional problems with them.