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There is so much in the media about how young people are not what they used to be. How young people are seen as flaky. How young people are seen as without ambition. How young people are seen as presenting a whole range of mental health issues. How young people are addicted to social media and destructive behaviour. Categorising young people with these negative connotations is ageist because it’s creating stereotypes.
Are Young People Sick?
Another, perhaps more sinister, trend is starting to accelerate. The issues of young people are being defined as disorders that need to be cured. For a cure, find a medication. Imagine what it would have meant in the Sixties if the exuberance of youth, the engagement with rock and roll, the desire for free love, and the commitment to pacifism were seen as a mental aberration that needed to be dealt with by drugs. By contrast, in the Sixties, you had psychiatrists and psychotherapists seeking to de-medicalise mental health. R.D. Laing, for example, believed that mental illness was a sane response to an insane world and that a psychiatrist had a duty to communicate empathetically with patients. He created an environment in which schizophrenics were not medicated but supported exploring their insanity. For Laing, society and the family were the source of the problems. Insanity was a social construct, not a diagnosable medical condition.
Parallel: Medicalisation of Homosexuality
In the sixties, the legalisation of homosexuality brought to an end hormone treatment as an alternative to imprisonment. Previously, the behaviour was perceived as a medical disorder that could be treated with drugs. The famous mathematician and original computer scientist Alan Turing died by suicide in the face of a requirement to have hormone treatment or face prison. Medicalising a social problem can be very damaging. Similarly, there were unmarried mothers sent to mental asylums because their moral delinquency made them ‘feeble-minded’ as late as the 1950s. I have met some who were so institutionalised that they were still in an asylum in the 1980s.
Children and COVID-19
This trend of medical interventions with children to address wider societal problems was demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although all the evidence was that COVID-19 presented a very low risk of fatality for children, children were treated as though the risk of COVID was a medical problem for them. Authorities denied them access to school or compromised their teaching environments, not because children were likely to die from COVID-19, but because society demanded that medical intervention (isolation, distancing, open windows in the winter) be imposed upon them because it was inconvenient for society to provide them with schooling.
Other examples of medicalising the behaviour of children and responding with medication include ADHD, depression, schizophrenia, issues around gender identity, challenging behaviour and poor education outcomes. The problems of family and society breakdown, inappropriate educational approaches, lack of socialisation during COVID isolation, gang culture and child poverty are left poorly addressed. Increasingly, such issues are being made the responsibility of medical professionals, who are then required to treat these children and accept that the way they express themselves is a symptom of an underlying health condition. The report in 2024 about the scandal of the Tavistock Centre’s Gender Identify Service is another example of drastic, scientifically unjustified medical treatment of troubled children with hormone therapy leading to radical surgery.
Understanding Complex Systems
By denying the possibility young peoples’ behaviour is symptomatic of broader systemic problems in society, systemic solutions are never addressed. When I had severe hypermania in my late teens and early twenties, psychiatrists and psychologists offered family therapy. Indeed, a vital part of the treatment was direct work with my parents. Family therapy recognises that in young people and children, the dysfunction of the family system is the source of disturbance for their offspring. It will not be resolved by treating the child but by moving the family towards better functioning.
Wider Implications for Ageism
The returning swing of the pendulum to medicalise all the challenges of childhood and youth disempower and reinforces ageist stereotypes of younger people. But beware, this medicalisation will creep up the ages. Consider the medicalisation of obesity, where new drug treatments are being promoted, that will create enormous costs for society rather than fixing the challenge of a corporate food system that makes only unhealthy food affordable. Reflect on the desire to medicalise cigarette addiction and replace one addiction with another. Consider the move to encourage GPs to do social subscribing. Somehow, doctors should be the people who set the standard for how you behave: more exercise, less smoking, joining a choir, becoming part of a community, volunteering. Why is it that doctors should be medicalising how we lead our lives?
Medicalising the issues of children and young people is the source of creeping ageism, creating a set of stereotypes that will, over time, creep up the age scale. You, yourself, may end up being stereotyped by the medicalisation of choices that you choose to make simply because You happen to be countercultural.
You are already at risk that the social care of elderly people, who want to have control of their lives, increasingly relies on tranquilisers to ensure more compliance with a regime that struggles to provide meaningful care.
Conclusion
Beware that the medicalisation, stigmatisation and ageist stereotypes applied to younger people establish a creeping societal precedent that will undermine your freedom and joy as your behaviour becomes a medical symptom demanding treatment and non-compliance will be socially unacceptable.
Charles McLachlan is the founder of FuturePerfect and on a mission to transform the future of work and business. The Portfolio Executive programme is a new initiative to help executives build a sustainable and impactful second-half-career. Creating an alternative future takes imagination, design, organisation and many other thinking skills. Charles is happy to lend them to you.