A STAGGERING one in eight British parents say their child has a disability and most say behaviour and mental health are their children’s biggest issues, according to government figures.
The data released by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) last month show around 12 per cent of under-18s – 1.7million – live with a long-term illness, disability, or a behavioural issue such as autism or ADHD. That statistic has almost doubled since 2015, when figures were 7 per cent.
Almost two thirds of children with a disability were described as having a ‘social’ or ‘behavioural’ impairment. Autism cases are rising sharply, as are speech, language and communication needs.
The 2024/2025 statistics come from the Family Resources Survey (FRS) annual report run by the DWP that collects information on income, benefits, housing costs, disability, health, family structure, childcare and material deprivation.
You would imagine a deafening outcry – our most vulnerable citizens face a lifetime on disability benefits – but although former health minister Alan Milburn is conducting a review of challenges facing young people starting school, and the barriers to finding work, no one is looking for the root cause.
So what is happening? What are the red flags? They broadly fit into three categories, physical and mental disability caused by childhood vaccination, the detrimental effects of social media and the harms caused by mental healthcare, poor parenting and the dissolution of the family unit.
An independent study looking at the health of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children was completed in 2016, titled Impact of Childhood Vaccination on Short and Long-Term Health Outcomes in Children: A Birth Cohort Study. A team at Henry Ford Health (HFH) teaching hospital in Detroit, Michigan, reviewed the health records of 18,468 children born between 2000 and 2016; 1,957 were unvaccinated and 16,511 had received at least one vaccine.
They measured brain dysfunction and other psychological disabilities and found that no children in the unvaccinated group had developed ADHD, tics, learning disabilities, behavioural disabilities or other psychological disabilities. Only one child in the unvaccinated group had developed autism compared with 23 in the vaccinated group.
The vaccinated children also suffered significantly more chronic ill health. The paper’s conclusion read: ‘Exposure to vaccination was independently associated with an overall 2.5-fold increase in the likelihood of developing a chronic health condition, when compared with children unexposed to vaccination.
‘This association was primarily driven by asthma, atopic disease, eczema, autoimmune disease and neurodevelopmental disorders. This suggests that in certain children, exposure to vaccination may increase the likelihood of developing a chronic health condition, particularly for one of these conditions.’
(Read more here and watch Del Bigtree’s film An Inconvenient Study.)
Did covid vaccines and the draconian lockdown pandemic response damage children’s health? The number of children with behavioural disorders who are eligible for disability living allowance (DLA) has almost quadrupled to 276,000 since before the pandemic. This total includes 10,000 children under five and 14 who are less than a year old.
Social media has had a significant impact on some children’s mental health. Last month, a landmark court case brought against social media giants Meta (Instagram and Facebook) and Google (YouTube) by a 17-year-old girl, now 20, known as KGM, found both tech companies guilty of negligence.
KGM said her use of social media was detrimental to her mental health, causing depression and anxiety, and accused the companies of knowingly engineering their products to be addictive to children. They failed to warn families of this possibility, the court heard.
The infinite scroll feature and algorithmic recommendations contributed to mental health issues like anxiety and depression, the jury ruled. The companies were ordered to pay damages of $6million to the plaintiff in a 70/30 split, with Meta paying the bigger share. Both companies disagree with the verdict and plan to appeal.
Then there is the rush to diagnose every emotion as a mental illness. The psychotherapist and co-founder of the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry, James Davies, wrote a book in 2021 called Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created The Mental Health Crisis.
Dr Davies said that since the 1990s, Big Pharma has shaped psychiatric research, training and practice through financial sponsorship. It funds many influential mental health charities, patient groups and heads of psychiatry departments, he said, adding that the industry has also paid for, commissioned, designed and conducted nearly all the clinical trials into psychiatric drugs.
He added: ‘It is little wonder that the over-medicalisation – and subsequent medicating – of emotional distress has proliferated.
‘Yet in nations where antidepressant prescriptions have doubled in the past 20 years (including the UK, US, Australia, Iceland and Canada), we have also witnessed the doubling of people claiming disability payments due to mental health problems, as the work of Robert Whitaker, a US researcher (and the author of Mad In America, a book on psychiatric treatment) has shown.
‘This is the opposite of what you would expect if the drugs were working – and it can’t simply be put down to an increase in awareness of mental health conditions. If psychiatric medications were effective long-term treatments, then an increase in diagnosis and treatment shouldn’t lead to a rise in disability.’
Dr Davies disputes whether medical diagnoses such as anxiety, depression and bipolar should exist at all. He said he realised as far back as 2000 that ‘the vast majority of people diagnosed and prescribed psychiatric medication were not mentally ill or dysfunctional in any substantiated or medical sense. Far from being pathological, they were having sane yet painful reactions to factors such as poverty, trauma, family breakdown, social discrimination, abuse and so forth.’
The US mental health bible is called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). In 1952 its first edition listed 106 mental health disorders that by 2022 had increased to 298 disorders, nearly three times as many. Is our mental health really disintegrating at such an alarming rate, or is capitalism and the ever-increasing number of psychiatric drugs responsible? In 1952, there was one psychiatric drug – chlorpromazine, used for schizophrenia. Now, there are 200 plus drugs used to treat mental health disorders.
Poor parenting cannot be ruled out as a contributing factor. Social or behavioural impairment, terms poorly defined by government, was the most common problem cited by parents the FRS found. Experts claim oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), characterised by stubborn behaviour, outbursts of anger and ignoring instructions from adults, is one example.
Another example is a condition called conduct disorder, a more aggressive form of ODD that is often diagnosed in teenagers. Frankly, this sounds like the typical rebellious child or teenager, but psychiatrists say both conditions are defined by challenging behaviour lasting six months or more. Symptoms include frequent temper tantrums, over-sensitivity, resentment, arguing with adults or authority figures, refusing to follow rules or requests, deliberately annoying others, blaming others for mistakes and being spiteful or vindictive.
Poor parenting is partly to blame for ODD and conduct disorder, experts say, with inconsistent discipline, harsh and punitive responses, high levels of criticism or conflict, and little praise for good behaviour cited as adversely affecting children. But in an age when there are thousands of parenting books, how can parents get it so wrong?
Would things look different if families were nurtured instead of both parents being encouraged into full time work? Would their parenting be less inconsistent? If communities were strong and families not fractured, would raising children be easier? What would happen if the childhood vaccine programme was abandoned? And what would happen if mental health care focused on the person and not a prescription? All questions highly unlikely to be explored by the uni-party.
