Rachel White remembers being 10 years old and locking herself in the bathroom so she could cry without other people knowing.
“It was a safe space. I would get so overwhelmed and I would be over-analysing anything. I felt conscious, constantly aware of everything,” she says.
The now 25-year-old remembers doing a test when she was 12 to mark the end of primary school. “I got so stressed out I completely blacked out.”
She didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning of the Donegal woman’s struggle with mental health difficulties.
RM Block
She started receiving treatment when she was 16, and felt better by the end of school. In college she was doing well, until she began to experience bouts of very low mood.
“It was tough because things were at a crisis point there. It was exhausting every day to get up. Sometimes I didn’t feel like getting out of bed at all.”
Rachel isn’t the only young person who has felt that way. On Thursday, youth mental health charity Jigsaw published its 2024 annual report, which found the organisation delivered more than 62,000 clinical contacts last year.
According to the report, four in 10 young people accessing its services presented with high levels of mental health distress. Jeff Moore, research director at the charity, said pre-Covid this figure would have been three in 10.
Mr Moore said young people’s mental health has been “deteriorating for about two decades”, but the pandemic “accelerated it in a lot of ways”.
“This is not a temporary issue. It’s an issue that needs a really long-term Government and policy response,” he said.
The reasons behind this increase in severity are “complex”, Mr Moore added, though in the Irish context he said housing insecurity is a common issue raised among those accessing Jigsaw’s services.
“Issues like uncertainty around the future, whether that’s climate change, climate anxiety, that’s a real thing that’s driving young people’s mental health. It’s a collection of issues and it’s the fact that these issues are never going away, they’re very constant.”
Edel Connolly (24) started struggling with mental health difficulties when she was 13 as she was transitioning to secondary school. She would feel sick every morning in school and put her head down in class.
She didn’t tell anyone in the beginning, until suddenly she became worried about her own safety.
“I was self-harming and I was thinking about suicide. So I told my mam,” she said.
She went to the GP, started therapy and developed mechanisms to help herself. Though there were “setbacks”, she felt she was on the road to recovery. When she was late diagnosed with ADHD and autism aged 19 and 21 respectively, her teenage feelings made more sense to her.
“I spent my teenage years thinking there was something wrong with me but there were no words to explain why or how,” she added.
That transition into secondary school was also a turning point for Kildare man Eoin McEvoy. He sought help for anxiety aged 12 but was told he was not severe enough to be admitted to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (Camhs).
Eventually his condition deteriorated to such an extent he dropped out of school in transition year. He spent a “short period of time” in and out of a psychiatric hospital, but now he is much more optimistic about his future.
“I attended a school for school-leavers who struggle with mental health, made my way through PLCs, and I slowly managed to get better with my anxiety. Now I’m going into my second year of psychology at UCD. I have a partner who’s amazing for me. I’m happy.”
