In case you hadn’t noticed, our children are going through a mental health crisis.

The school gate topic of the year is the supposed anxiety that our kids are going through and, of course, this is nothing new. I think there are frescoes in Pompeii showing concerned parents debating the state of their children’s lives. But these times are different as we have the tools to do something about it and boy, are we becoming paranoid about the subject.

It used to be blamed on helicopter parents, or Gen Z themselves, or social media, or too much time on their phones, or video games or a host of other hot topics.

The 21st Century answer? Medicate them. Nearly 500,000 antidepressant prescriptions are being doled out each year to children despite guidance that they should never be used except in the most severe cases. Last year, 3,920 such prescriptions were given out to children under 10! The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence advises that NO child should be put on antidepressants until they have been assessed by a specialist child psychiatrist, yet research shows that only one in four have been referred – the rest are just given the prescription and sent on their way, likely to a life of drug dependence.

Majorie Wallace, the Chief Executive of the charity Sane, states, “We have created a generation of lost, lonely and disconnected children. We should not be handing out antidepressants to children simply because there is nothing else to offer.”

Anna Williams, 24, from London, started struggling with depression and anxiety aged 13 and was put on antidepressants. At 24, she tried to wean herself off them but had to restart after suffering terrible withdrawal symptoms. “My anxiety shot up and l couldn’t even leave the house. I had extreme temperature fluctuations, nausea, panic attacks and suicidal thoughts. It feels like the NHS doesn’t want to say ‘we can’t help,’ so they just dole out tablets that can leave you hooked for life.”

Reading the existential theologian Paul Tillich, anxiety comes in three exciting flavours – moral (from guilt of failure), spiritual (from a meaningless life), and ontic (fear of the future and death). Tillich’s conclusion on anxiety? “It is part of the human condition, there is no cure.”

Now l have to turn to the columnist Caitlin Moran, who feels she has the answer to the current trend of ‘drug ‘em till they shut up’ and l quote, “As a kid in 1992, sharing a bed with my sister with parents living on £110 a week, l think l had all those anxieties, and there is a cure for them - l think l just needed hope and money. I just needed to get out of there.

“Two years later – with a job, a flat in London and enough money for the essentials of chicken, cider and fags – my suspicions were confirmed. In this new, happy, well-paid life, my anxiety had shrunk from ‘my primary characteristic’ to ‘the odd wobble around French words on menus, and boys’.”

Anxiety might well be part of the human condition, but it’s a smaller, much more manageable part when life feels like it’s getting bigger and better, when life is full of paid bills and adventures, and there’s a feeling you’re living through a golden age when you have money
and a country that feels hopeful.

I don’t think Gen Z are either badly parented nor internet-addicted snowflakes who need therapy and pills. I suspect that what they actually need is money and hope. They need to get out of here, they need a golden age too.

Everyone’s job makes them anxious and depressed at times. But if you’re working 9-5 and, at the end of it you’ve still built no future; if you will never be able to afford a house or a baby; if going out clubbing is too expensive; if you’re still living with your weary parents; if you can afford neither fun now nor stability later, well, the results are obvious. Spiritual, moral and ontic anxiety, caused by that most classic of problems: being poor and seeing no future. And if this is how the parents might be feeling, what hope do the kids have of feeling chipper?

For a few, there is a genuine mental health crisis but for the many, it is essentially gaslighting to have this presented as a mental health crisis, when it’s so obviously, at root, an economic crisis.

These kids aren’t broken. They’re just...broke.