Mental Health: Young People

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall make some remarks about anorexia and obesity in children and young people, subjects that I have spent a chunk of my academic career studying. Anorexia has the highest death rate of any psychiatric disorder. Childhood obesity, as we all know, has taken on the characteristics of a huge epidemic: 20% of children aged 10 and 11 are obese in England and Wales. They seem separate conditions, almost opposites, but they are very closely linked. Both should be categorised as in some part mental disorders and are becoming so. The link is obsession-compulsion in relation to food and the body. Bulimia is like a bridge between the two in the experience of some young people.

There is a kind of unbelievable historical reversal going on here. Being fat was a characteristic of rich people and affected a tiny proportion of people in history. Anorexia was not even diagnosed until the late 19th century and was only known in the activities of saints fasting for the glory of God. Then about 50 years ago we had an amazing generalisation, not just in this country but across the world, of these linked conditions. To me, the main driving force is the advent of supermarket culture from about the 1950s and 1960s. This was the time when one had to decide what to eat in relation to how to be and we found an invasion of the body by compulsions and addictions.

I became interested in anorexia one weekend when I picked up two colour supplements of the Sunday papers. One had a starving teenager in Africa and the other had a starving teenager in the United States in the midst of an abundance of food. I thought that these conditions must be totally different, and so they are. We can be sure that these do not have genetic origins and the family and the peer group are plainly important influences. The family has a double role, obviously, because it can be causative in mental disorders as well as therapeutic. The work of the AYPH, which we are discussing today, is valuable here and slots into wider academic research.

I have a couple of quick questions for the Minister. Are the plans to combat eating disorders announced in January 2016 still on track? What happened to the waiting time targets for teenagers with eating disorders? Finally, what progress has been made with the conclusions of the document Childhood Obesity: A Plan for Action, which also came out in 2016?