Claire was quoted in a Daily Mail article about the proposed Mental Health Bill:
“Young people are demanding medication to treat their mental health issues despite being ‘not that ill’, Parliament has heard.
Baroness Fox of Buckley, a former Brexit Party MEP, said there was an 18 per cent rise in prescriptions for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) drugs between April 2023 and March 2024.
The non-affiliated peer told the House of Lords that ADHD had become ‘the fashionable disorder of the day’ and there are now ‘huge numbers of students and school pupils’ asking for treatment.
Speaking during an examination of the proposed Mental Health Bill, which aims to overhaul existing legislation, Lady Fox argued the increased demand for medication could cause councils to go bankrupt and for schools to ‘collapse’.
She added that ‘therapeutic experts, counsellors and psychological practitioners’ are becoming ‘diagnostically trigger happy in labelling people as ill’, which she argued is driving up demand for treatment.
‘Isn’t it tragic that so many people want their children, or want themselves, to have these drugs in order to feel that they can cope? When they’re actually, really, not that ill, or not ill at all, but they’ve got the label,’ she added.
The peer said: ‘That often leads to a clamouring, especially amongst younger people, for pills to help them cope with the travails of life, and this is being egged on in some way by the therapeutic practitioners.’
Lady Fox continued: ‘At the Academy of Ideas, we had a debate on young people and mental health and these kind of issues, and the audience was largely young people who said that the problem was that psychiatrists and GPs and doctors wouldn’t listen to them and wouldn’t believe them that they’re mentally ill, they demanded treatment, and they were quite aggressive.
‘And it was kind of one of those, you know, young people saying “where are my tablets”.
‘And I thought, life has changed slightly. And it was the psychiatrists in the room who were trying to hold the line and gently suggest maybe they weren’t ill.
‘And that led to even more hysterical reaction – “how dare you say that I’m not ill”.’
She continued: ‘ADHD is the fashionable disorder of the day, and there are huge numbers of students and school pupils demanding that their neurodevelopmental disorder is recognised and catered for.
‘In my view, it’s often diagnosed promiscuously and it’s leading to huge demands that I think are actually detrimental to education, by the way. It’s likely to make councils go bankrupt and schools collapse.’
Lady Fox, who is the founder of the think tank Academy of Ideas, also argued the Bill could lead to ‘people queueing up to point the finger’ at mental health practitioners, due to the current ‘complaints culture’.”
Read the full article in the Daily Mail.