Natasha Devon, sacked last week as a mental health champion for young people. Photograph: Ken McKay/Rex

We live with an epidemic of anxiety. In 1980, 4% of Americans suffered a mental disorder associated with anxiety. Today half do. The trends in Britain are similar. A third of Britons will experience anxiety disorder at some stage in their life, with an explosion of reported anxiety among teenagers and young adults. Anxiety, depression, self-harm, attention deficit disorder and profound eating problems afflict our young as never before.

Anxiety has always been part of the human condition – as has depression and tendencies to self-harm – but never, it seems, on this scale. A number of trends appear to be colliding. This is an era when everyone is expected to find their personal route to happiness at the same time as the bonds of society, faith and community – tried and tested mechanisms to support wellbeing – are fraying. Teenagers in particular – fearful of missing out – are beset by a myriad of agonising choices about how to achieve the good life with fewer social and psychological anchors to help them navigate their way. Who can blame them if they respond with an ever rising sense of anxiety, if not panic?

Life never was and never can be an uninterrupted progress towards utopian bliss. Grief following the loss of someone beloved, a great ambition thwarted or simply witnessing one’s body age or wither through illness are all concomitants of being alive – pains alongside life’s many wonderful pleasures On the other hand, there is no doubt that the patients complaining of acute mental anxiety feel intensely disturbed beyond some normal level of anxiousness – and that teenagers can feel this more acutely still.

Happiness – when individual liberty is seen as all-important – lies in exercising choice and taking responsibility for our own lives. Get the choices right, and self-realisation, self-fulfillment and happiness will follow. Get them wrong and you risk mockery and marginalisation. Teenagers know as never before that they must get their choices right, pass their exams – and many will have 24/7 parents “helping” them in their quest. However, the act of making many choices with necessarily imperfect information perforce induces anxiety and stress – and once they are made, happiness does not automatically follow. Small wonder that teenagers in general, and teenage girls in particular, find the whole experience traumatising – as do their elders, even if they have better-developed emotional and psychological resource to deal with it.

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Source: Only fundamental social change can defeat the anxiety epidemic