Why so Blue?

`Why so sad

 My fine young friend

 Why so blue'    (Paul McCartney)

I read in the Guardian last week that, according to research conducted by University College, London, 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 10 boys are depressed by the age of 14. This is no doubt exacerbated by the fact that many schools are having to cut pastoral and mental health support services at the very time they are most needed.

I have 6 adopted kids, 4 girls and 2 boys. They went to primary school immediately disadvantaged: one of my daughters had to wear a sticker over one lens of her (thick) glasses due to a `lazy’ eye. The hospital gave us stickers with fairies and princesses to cover the lens. A black pirate patch might have made a bolder statement. Two of them needed grommets and speech therapy, as their hearing loss had not been identified, until we adopted them. Despite my best and lengthy efforts one was persistently sent home- mortified- with nits. And then there was the: `So you’re adopted. My mum says that means your real mum doesn’t want you.’

Bullying is not a new phenomenon. As a therapist, I’ve had a twenty stone builder weep when he remembered how he was made to stand up in front of the class and read aloud.

I didn’t have eye patches, grommets or nits, when I was a kid, but I did have red hair (`Carrot tops’ was a favoured epithet, which used to incense me, as carrot tops are green.) I was also illegitimate at a time when nice middle class parents told their kids not to play with me and to find out whether my mum had lots of boyfriends.

Why are more girls depressed than boys? I doubt this differential has changed much over the years. For a start, girls are meaner. They whisper and exclude, boys, in the main, just slug it out in the playground.

However, the hypersexualisation of girls is a relatively new phenomenon. Again, as a therapist, I have a client whose seven year old daughter attends pamper parties and spends hours in  her room watching YouTube videos about the correct application of make-up. I’ve seen nine year olds roll their skirts over at the waist to make them shorter, flout the school ban on nail varnish, foundation, hoop earrings. Some even have high or lowlights and expensively cut, long, straight hair from the very first day of primary school. Frizzy is never good. A client told me a boy sent her a Valentine card when she was 14: `Roses are red, violets are blue, your hair looks like pubes and no one will ever love you.’

It’s true that clothes and hair styles have always been a source of mockery for both sexes, which is why, again, I have one client who can remember being ridiculed for wearing home-knitted jumpers (I would never send a kid to a school that didn’t have a uniform, for that reason.) Another client had a mum who cut his hair rather than send him to the barber’s and another had a mum who refused to buy him swimming trunks, so he had to wear underpants at his swimming lessons.

My 14 year old son made me watch several episodes of `Catfish’, the TV show. For the uninitiated a catfish is someone who pretends to be someone they’re not, using social media to create a false identity and have online relationships. I was sent to boarding school at 11, by which time I was not only a ginger and illegitimate, I had a new Canadian accent. Inevitably, I got called Canada instead of Amanda for a whole year (the year it took me to ditch the accent). I’m ashamed to say that out of boredom and sick of being bullied, I started writing to a `pen pal’ out of a magazine, pretending to be a boy. I liked the feeling of power, but panicked when she wanted to meet me and confessed, blaming it on a dare.

So life may be impossibly tough for kids and teenagers in 2017, but bullying in all its forms has always been present. Two things, perhaps, are very different… Read tomorrow’s blog to find out what I think!