Baroness Cash (Con)

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Maclean, for securing this debate. I am also grateful to my noble friends for their contributions so far, particularly their citation of the data, which will save me from repeating it. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Shah, for sharing her own personal story, which brings to life some of the challenges faced by families in extreme circumstances. Given the extraordinary rise in diagnoses of mental illness among young people, I want to address young adults in particular. We need to ask, as the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, said, whether we have fundamentally altered how a generation defines mental ill-health and how they handle it. It is absolutely not the case that there are not serious conditions and children and young adults in desperate need of help, but there is also a vast increase in the number of young adults who are meeting the threshold for a common mental health condition, most commonly anxiety and depression. At the same time, among the category of disabled young people who are not in education, employment or training, the proportion citing mental ill-health as their primary condition has rocketed from 24.3% in 2011 to 42.6% in 2025. That is an extraordinary rise. As the Milburn review has reported, we are seeing a generation of young adults, at what should be the beginning of their working lives, increasingly defined by a psychiatric diagnosis and absent from education and work. They are absent from their own lives. The rocketing numbers are a warning for us as a society. As the noble Baroness said, we need to examine very carefully whether the definitions of mental illness have expanded too far in some cases. A diagnosis is not a neutral thing; it has the power to shape how a young person defines themselves, and how others then treat them. Some noble Lords know that I co-founded a behavioural science business and spent 10 years immersed in the research. The body of science now shows us that how we treat people, and how they define themselves, has a massive impact on their life and health outcomes. Professor Langer’s work has showed the profound influence of context and expectation on human functioning. Albert Bandura demonstrated self-efficacy: the belief that “I can do this” is a powerful predictor of whether people persist through difficulty. We are not giving this whole generation of troubled young people those messages any more. Martin Seligman’s famous work on learned helplessness showed the very opposite: when people come to believe they have little control over their circumstances—and this is what we are telling them—they stop trying, even when improvement is possible. There is such a profound difference between telling a young person that they are experiencing anxiety but, with support, can learn strategies to manage it or face the situations that frighten them; and telling them that they have an anxiety disorder, which explains why these situations are too difficult for them to take on. One message reinforces agency and the other victimhood. Sometimes children get told one thing, but too many young adults are being told the opposite. The Government deserve enormous credit for commissioning Professor Fonagy, Sir Simon Wessely and colleagues to ask the difficult questions about excessive diagnosis, medicalisation and whether our systems have become far too dependent on labels. Can the Minister confirm to the House that she will pursue the outcome of that review and its findings in full? Can she ensure that those findings are communicated to the other relevant departments, and that there is collaboration between those departments?