Dr. Joseph Duffy:

When I speak to the staff in the services, they talk about the levels of anxiety young people experience. As Mr. Boksberger was saying, when we begin to peel it back and ask them what is behind that, much of it is around the sense of social comparison. They ask "Who am I?" and "How do I fit in?". If we think about it - Ms Hughes mentioned it earlier on - there are normal tasks in adolescence. The reason we have adolescence is that transition from being a child to an adult. People can learn more about the world and get a sense of their identity. There is a real sense for young people now of wanting to know immediately what their identity is, because other groups on Instagram or other social media platforms are gathered by identity. Rather than letting it flow and letting it work itself out, there is a real sense of everything needing to be immediate and that is producing considerable anxiety. There is considerable anxiety around the broader sense of identity. People would have thought about sexual identity, but now it is thought of in a much broader sense. There is constant feedback and the sense, as Mr. Boksberger mentioned earlier on, and experience of being excluded. The other part of it, when we talk to the staff, is they say young parents are finding it difficult with regard to how they parent. How can they parent a child now who is experienced in and used to using technology in a way they are not used to using at all and of which they have no understanding? How do you take some of the heat out of that? How do you say it is normal to go through many different feelings, have many different friendships and not know what you want to do in life? How can we normalise that? There is still considerable pressure in our education system and our expectations with regard to being in school full-time, for people who cannot be, and all sorts of different things.