Image: Flickr/David Mican. Some rights reserved.
Half of voters aged 18 to 24 cried or felt like crying when they heard that the UK had voted to leave the EU, recent research by the LSE has found. Having spent much of my working life treating young people who are emotionally affected by events they cannot control, I am not surprised.
What I find more unsettling is the hostility of some of the reactions to the news which ridiculed young people for being “hysterical”, “crybabies” or “angst-ridden teenies”. Such phrases reveal a worrying tendency in our society to both dismiss the views of young people as worthless, and to belittle the seriousness of their emotional and mental well-being. It’s a tendency that contributes to the stigma around mental illness, which in turn is one of the causes of our failure to invest in prevention or to provide adequate mental health services for vulnerable young people.
