Children’s Society says ‘distressing’ findings are warning sign of future issues for teenagers

Growing numbers of British children are unhappy with their lives, with many worrying about school, friends and how they look, a report reveals.

The number of 10- to 15-year-olds who say they are not happy rose from 173,000 (3.8%) in 2009-10 to an estimated 306,000 (6.7%) in 2018-19, the Children’s Society found. That 6.7% – one in every 15 young people – is the highest proportion in the last decade, it said.

Psychiatrists say rising demand is overwhelming services amid rigours of pandemic

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A record number of children and young people with a potentially life-threatening eating disorder are waiting for treatment in England, as psychiatrists warn soaring demand is overwhelming services.

NHS data analysed by the Royal College of Psychiatrists shows that while the number of those waiting for urgent and routine treatment has reached record levels during the pandemic, more children and young people are being treated than ever before.

Researchers find minimal interactions by teen users can trigger a deluge of thin-body and dieting images

Instagram’s algorithms are pushing teenage girls who even briefly engage with fitness-related images towards a flood of weight-loss content, according to new research which aimed to recreate the experience of being a child on social networks.

Researchers adopting “mystery shopper” techniques set up a series of Instagram profiles mirroring real children and followed the same accounts as the volunteer teenagers. They then began liking a handful of posts to see how quickly the network’s algorithm pushed potentially damaging material into the site’s “explore” tab, which highlights material that the social network thinks a user might like.

Over the past year, many of us have suffered from physical and emotional exhaustion. It is no surprise that people have turned to food for comfort

Naomi Boles hit a wall last October. “I wasn’t sleeping at all and I felt like I couldn’t keep going,” she recalls. “I was so stressed, and even when I was in bed my brain was constantly racing as I was worrying so much about my health, about my income, about my children. When I went to the doctor, it was like I’d reached a point where I couldn’t carry on any more.”

Nine months on, she is still recovering from that burnout. “I am finally getting to the point where I can be a bit easier on myself and not constantly be in this fight-or-flight mode,” she says.

Hospitalised with an eating disorder as a teenager, she recovered to become a campaigner. Her mission? To show that eating disorders aren’t always visible

Hope Virgo’s description of her descent into anorexia is so harrowing and filled with danger that meeting her in real life – in the south London flat she shares with her fiance – is like meeting the personification of triumph or optimism. “In the media, you see the same stories, the same distressed, emaciated person; you hear of people dying,” Virgo says. “We need to hear those stories, but at the same time, I really believe that a full recovery is possible. I think we lose sight of that glimmer of hope.”

In her book Stand Tall Little Girl, she gives the figures to back this up: 40% of people who have had an eating disorder never think about it again; 15% are unable to fight it off and are stuck in it; and 45% of people find a way to live with it, using coping mechanisms. Virgo’s pioneering work has an overarching purpose: to say, in her words and through her actions, that recovery is possible. It’s a rescue mission launched from regular life into a world of crisis – in which no one is seen as irrecoverable.