With the coronavirus pandemic adding fresh weight to already struggling mental health services for young people, we must urgently realise the cost of overlooking young minds. A worsening mental health crisis among younger generations will exacerbate the economic burdens to come, and could have impacts which reverberate long into the future. 

"Mental health services for children fail to meet soaring demand: The ongoing crisis is evidence of systematic discrimination against children."

These are words that I wrote almost exactly three years ago. Now I sit here reflecting on our current coronavirus crisis and what it means for our young people. Before we think about the impact of this crisis on the mental health of young people, let me set the scene pre-Covid-19.

Back in 2017, our editorial in the BMJ lamented the miserable progress on supporting our children and young people (CYP) with mental health problems in the UK over the preceding two decades, since the publication of a seminal report ‘Every Child Matters’. For example, although 75% of mental health problems start in childhood and adolescence, historically only 6% of our mental health budget has been allocated to CYP.

Even before the virus there was evidence that our children were experiencing ever increasing mental health problems.

So, what has been the progress over the past three years to demonstrate that every child does actually matter? There’s some good news. Within England (and similar work elsewhere in the UK), we welcomed the publication of the government’s green paper pledging to install mental health teams in schools, and work has started at pace – with the aim of covering the whole of England within the next 10 years.