Fixing the teenage mental health crisis means helping marriages to work
from Coalition for Marriage:
Last week saw one of the most concerning poll findings of recent years. A huge survey of British 14 year-olds, published by the Children’s Society and based on the Millennium Cohort Study found that:
One in six (16%) of more than 11,000 children surveyed reported self-harming at this age, including nearly one in 10 boys (9%).
These figures are themselves dire, but there is one group in which the figures are particularly bad:
Almost half of 14-year-olds who said they had been attracted to people of the same gender or both genders said they had self-harmed (46%), analysis of the Millennium Cohort Survey revealed. Four in ten of these children had shown signs of depression (38%) and three in ten had low well-being (30%) – both compared with one in ten (11 per cent) of all children.
So it appears that there is at least a correlation between underage children identifying as either homosexual or bisexual and having poor mental welfare.
Of course one argument put forward in explanation is that a lack of social acceptance for these lifestyles is the root cause. But as the liberal journalist David Aaronovitch wrote in The Times (£):