(Press-News.org) One in five young people in the UK now access specialist mental health care by age 18 – a four-fold increase in under two decades, new research suggests.
Figures from Wales – which researchers say serve as an accurate indicator for the whole of the UK – indicate a consistent year-on-year rise in service use, with a sharp acceleration after 2010.
Experts warn that existing services may no longer meet the needs of today’s young people, with many treatment decisions based on decades-old evidence.
Rates of mental ill health among young people have been rising across the world. Despite this, there has been a lack of evidence on the proportion of young people using specialist NHS child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS), and how this has changed over time.
Researchers from the University of Edinburgh tracked children born in Wales from 1991 to 2005 to measure how many had accessed specialist care before their 18th birthday.
They found that, of all individuals born in 1991, 5.8 per cent had attended CAMHS before they turned 18 in 2009. In comparison, of all individuals born in 2005, 20.2 per cent had attended CAMHS by the time the turned 18 in 2023 – a rise from one in 17 young people to one in five.
The findings provide the reliable service-use data that is critical for planning, policymaking and evaluating how well systems are responding to rising need, experts say. Given the similar clinical framework for CAMHS and the shared, long-term drivers of demand across the four nations, the researchers say that trends from Wales likely apply to all of the UK.
The study analysed anonymised administrative health records from the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) databank, which covers most of the Welsh population.
Adolescents were far more likely than younger children to be in touch with CAMHS. In the early 2000s there were similar numbers of boys and girls attending services, but by 2022 there were nearly twice as many girls as boys.
The findings highlight the pressing need for more research into the factors driving the rising demand and an assessment of the real-world effectiveness of interventions offered in CAMHS, experts say.
Ian Kelleher, study lead and Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh, said: “This study provides the clearest picture yet of the soaring demand for CAMHS. There has been a seismic shift in the numbers coming to CAMHS but there has been far too little research to understand why this is the case. Contrary to a lot of public discourse, this is not a post-pandemic issue – this trend has been building consistently for over a decade.
“Unlike oncology or cardiology services, there is far too little research and evaluation taking place in CAMHS. Clinicians want to provide the best possible care but we need stronger modern evidence on which to base our treatment decisions. Robust clinical research programmes are not a luxury, they are the only way to ensure our systems and treatments are effective for today’s young people.”
The study is published in the journal British Journal of Psychiatry: https://DOI.org/10.1192/bjp.2025.10480 [URL will become active after embargo lifts]. It was funded by the Academy of Medical Sciences.
END
Dramatic rise in young people using mental health services
2025-12-10
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Be careful trusting TikTok for gout advice
2025-12-10
A new paper in Rheumatology Advances in Practice, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that Tik Tok videos about gout are commonly misleading, inconsistent, or inaccurate.
Gout is a painful inflammatory arthritis caused by high urate in the blood that crystallizes and deposits in the joints. An estimated forty-one million people worldwide suffer from gout, with physicians diagnosing about seven million new cases a year. There are persistent gaps in awareness and understanding about gout among patients and the public. Although rheumatology guidelines recommend long-term urate-lowering therapy for ...
A study by the University of Seville links the vanishing of the specific heats at absolute zero with the principle of entropy increase
2025-12-10
In a new publication, Professor José-María Martín-Olalla, from the Department of Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Seville, has described the direct link between the vanishing of specific heats at absolute zero—a general experimental observation established in the early 20th century—and the second law of thermodynamics. The study, published in Physica Scripta, reinterprets a 100-year-old problem and completes the consequences of the principle of increasing entropy in the universe.
The new study follows another published in the European Physical Journal Plus in ...
Anxiety and insomnia may lower natural killer cell count, potentially repressing immune function
2025-12-10
Natural killer (NK) cells are the bodyguards of our immune system. As a first line of defense, they destroy invading pathogens, foreign bodies, and infected cells in early stages, thereby preventing them from spreading. NK cells can circulate within the blood stream (circulatory) or reside in tissue and organs. Having too few NK cells can lead to immune system dysfunction and increase susceptibility to disease.
Anxiety disorder and insomnia are two conditions that can disrupt the normal functioning of the immune system. Given these disorders ...
How parasitic, asexual plants evolve and live
2025-12-10
There are plants that are neither green nor sexually reproductive, but precisely because of that they teach us a lot about what it means to be a plant. New research with Kobe University participation took a close look at Balanophora to learn how such non-green, asexual plants evolve and live.
“My long-standing aim is to rethink what it truly means to be a plant,” says Kobe University botanist SUETSUGU Kenji. He continues, “For many years I have been fascinated by plants that have abandoned photosynthesis, and I want ...
Research spotlight: A subset of patients with depression could benefit from anti-inflammatory treatment
2025-12-10
Naoise Mac Giollabhui, PhD, of the Department of Psychiatry at Mass General Brigham, is the lead author of a paper published in American Journal of Psychiatry, “Effect of anti-inflammatory treatment on depressive symptom severity and anhedonia in depressed individuals with elevated inflammation: Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.” Richard Liu, PhD, of the Department of Psychiatry at Mass General Brigham, is the senior author.
Q: How would you summarize your study ...
New fully digital design paves the way for scalable probabilistic computing
2025-12-10
Artificial intelligence and machine learning could become dramatically more efficient, thanks to a new type of computer component developed by researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Tohoku University, in collaboration with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). The technology is based on "probabilistic bits," or "p-bits", which are hardware elements that naturally fluctuate between 0 and 1. Unlike conventional digital bits, which are fixed in value, p-bits can efficiently explore many possibilities. This makes them well-suited for solving problems such as optimization and inference, tasks that ...
Membrane electrode assembly design for high-efficiency anion exchange membrane water electrolysis
2025-12-10
Research Background
Hydrogen energy is vital for renewable energy storage and "dual carbon" goals, but 95% of global hydrogen production relies on fossil fuel reforming (emitting ~1.3 billion tons of CO₂ yearly), driving demand for green hydrogen via water electrolysis. Anion exchange membrane water electrolysis (AEMWE) combines the advantages of alkaline water electrolysis (noble-metal-free, low cost) and proton exchange membrane water electrolysis (high current density, compact structure), but its industrialization is limited by traditional ...
U.S. debt ceiling disputes show measurable impact on global crude oil markets
2025-12-10
Background and Motivation
The United States debt ceiling—the legal limit on federal borrowing—has been a recurring source of political and economic uncertainty, especially as U.S. national debt has nearly doubled over the past decade. While existing research has explored how broad economic policy uncertainty affects financial markets, little attention has been paid to the specific impact of debt ceiling uncertainty on commodity markets, particularly crude oil. Given oil’s central role in the global economy, understanding ...
Climate extremes triggered rare coral disease and mass mortality on the Great Barrier Reef
2025-12-10
University of Sydney marine biologists have identified a devastating combination of coral bleaching and a rare necrotic wasting disease that wiped out large, long-lived corals on the Great Barrier Reef during the record 2024 marine heatwave.
The study, led by Professor Maria Byrne and Sydney Horizon Fellow Dr Shawna Foo, found that bleaching triggered by extreme ocean temperatures was followed by an unprecedented outbreak of black band disease that killed massive Goniopora corals, also known as flowerpot or daisy coral, at One Tree Reef on the southern Great Barrier ...
Direct observation reveals “two-in-one” roles of plasma turbulence
2025-12-10
Background
Producing fusion energy requires heating plasma to more than one hundred million degrees and confining it stably with strong magnetic fields. However, plasma naturally develops fluctuations known as turbulence, and they carry heat outward and weaken confinement. Understanding how heat and turbulence spread is therefore essential.
Conventional theory has assumed that heat and turbulence move gradually from the center toward the edge. Yet experiments have sometimes shown heat and turbulence spreading much faster, similar to American football players passing a ball quickly across long distances so that a local change influences the entire field almost at once. Clarifying ...