Depression in adolescence is not rare. The last major survey (Green et al, 2005) reported that 80,000 children and young people in UK were suffering from depression: 0.2 per cent of under-10s are depressed; 1.4 per cent of 11 to 16-year-olds are depressed at any one time.
When it comes to mental health and wellbeing, our best estimates suggest that between 10 and 20 per cent of teenagers will suffer from depression at some point in adolescence – and this will not be a fleeting attack of “the blues”, but persistent, pervasive low mood.
Even this figure may be an underestimate: teenage depression is often not recognised either by family or schools, nor reported by the young. And factors that may raise depression rates in the young (such as climate change and latterly Covid-19 and its fallout) have come to considerably more prominence in 2020 than was the case in 2005.
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