Young people need jobs, not therapy

In case you missed it, UK health secretary Wes Streeting has just had a brainwave. If you’re a millennial, and this thing called ‘life’ is your problem, then apparently talking therapy on the NHS is the solution. Never fear about the dearth of semi-decent job opportunities, the lack of affordable housing, the sky-high energy and food bills, or the rest of it – what you need is a space to speak your truth. Let the NHS sort that out for you, and you’ll be back at the coalface in no time.

There are now 4.4million working-age people on sickness or incapacity benefits in England and Wales – a figure that has grown by a whopping 1.2million since 2019. Nearly 50 per cent of new claims are made on mental-health grounds, while one in four young people has a diagnosable mental-health condition. It’s painfully obvious that Labour must tackle the rise in both mental-health problems and worklessness – but a few weeks of talking therapy, as is being offered, is barely a sticking-plaster solution.

Last year, Streeting warned that mental-health problems are being overdiagnosed and there is a danger of pathologising normal feelings. Yet only a few weeks later, he backtracked. He apologised for his ‘divisive’ comments in the Guardian and launched an independent inquiry into why mental-health diagnoses have been on the rise, especially among younger people.

Now, despite still not having the answers (the inquiry is due to report back in the summer), Streeting has this week pledged to offer talking-therapy sessions to nine million people, costing an estimated £69million, in a bid to get millennials off benefits and back into work.

Firstly, if the government itself has admitted it doesn’t yet know the causes of our growing mental-health crisis, why is it pledging all of this costly assistance now? Why not wait for the results of the independent inquiry Streeting himself commissioned? And while free therapy might sound useful, we’re only actually talking about a month of that under the current provision – that’s five or so appointments. As anyone who has ever done therapy (as I have, for many years) will tell you, most private therapists recommend at least a course of six months of sessions. If you’ve got anything from PTSD to bipolar disorder, or have an ongoing serious mental-mealth condition that requires regular close monitoring, five sessions isn’t going to even touch the sides, let alone lead you to thriving in paid work.

Even more pressingly, while all this help is being pledged for a range of mental-health conditions currently affecting worklessness, people with the most severe problems are frequently slipping through the cracks, especially those suffering with personality disorders or psychotic delusions.

Make no mistake – I am a believer in the power of therapy. It has saved my life at least once, no exaggeration. But there are some serious caveats to that. Firstly, the therapy that saved me when on the brink of a serious psychotic episode last summer was the private kind I had to pay a clinical psychologist for. That clinical psychologist was the only professional support I had when a junior NHS psychiatrist took me off my long-term anti-psychotic meds, ‘as an experiment’ (her words), despite the fact I had been sectioned for a psychotic break in the past.

Secondly, talking therapy works best over a prolonged stretch of time. Streeting’s proposed month of help is enough to stir up all sorts of deeper issues, but not enough to actually deal with them. ‘When you change the things you look at, the things you look at change’, therapists are fond of saying. But while this might make for a natty wall hanging, it doesn’t actually alter the fundamental realities of your life.

Thirdly, talking about stuff that is troubling you is valuable, but it can only ever be a precursor to taking action. Yes, of course, many people benefit from feeling heard and identifying what about their life is distressing them. But if the source of your worries happens to be the paltry wage you’re getting for a non-job that barely covers the essentials – or maybe even having no job at all – therapy isn’t the solution.

As fantastic as the right therapy can be, it can’t wave a magic wand over structural, societal issues. It is meant to work alongside other vital tools, such as basic healthy living (exercise, nutritious food, decent sleep), sometimes medication, social connection and, critically, a solid support network. Good therapy can teach resilience, sure, so that when life isn’t going well, you have some inner resources to draw on to keep going. But therapy without opportunities is just more neoliberal, individualist blather, the kind that Labour tells us it abhors.

Labour may be making a serious mistake here with millennial voters. If thousands of them sign up for talking therapy, only to realise their lives suck for structural and economic reasons, rather than their own ‘traumatic’ experiences, the Labour government won’t just lose workers, it will also lose critical voters come the next election. Joblessness, low pay and poor working conditions are the real epidemics it needs to tackle.

Nichi Hodgson is the author of The Curious History of Dating: From Jane Austen to Tinder and Bound to You. Follow her Substack here.