I have battled what Churchill called “the black dog” since I was an adolescent, so I felt the immediate pang of sympathy most fellow sufferers feel. Isn’t it bad enough to have acne and A-levels without angst as well?
Prince Harry is rich and privileged but also bereaved and the product, like too many children, of a broken home. You might choose to think that following in his mother’s footsteps as a high-profile charity worker is just a public relations attempt at polishing up a somewhat tarnished adolescence, but I happen to think it genuine.
Last Tuesday in the Channel 4 series That’ll Teach ’Em, a group of cynical, resentful, academically unsuccessful 15-year-olds were taught at a recreated 1960s secondary modern school. Stripped of their mobile phones and 21st-century pseudo-adulthood, forced to call teachers sir and dress in unattractive uniforms, they not only had to sit the old CSE exams in maths and English (which seemed more demanding than today’s GCSEs) but also learn practical skills. The girls learnt to type, bake and sew, while the boys learnt to milk a goat, lay bricks and make a tea tray.
The transformation in these teenagers was amazing. Not only did they get slimmer, fitter and become more attractive human beings, but also they cheered up and blossomed into radiant self-confidence. Boys who had been truanting and priding themselves on being cheeky and “hard” turned out to be brilliant at woodwork.
Their astonishment and pride at gaining grade 1 in CSE was mirrored by the girl who, dismissed as an academic failure, plugged away at typing and got a grade 2. In tears of joy she said that whatever anybody said, she knew now she was good at something. You felt certain you were witnessing a life-changing experience that only the stroppiest girl in the group chose to turn her back on.
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I’m all for academic rigour and an academic elite, but it has been obvious for years that government obsession with academic results is a disaster for those who are not wired up to do GCSEs, let alone go on to university, which is supposed to make all young people employable.
I suspect that many of those who have added to the number of depressed teenagers would find themselves infinitely happier leaving school at 14 and having a good old-fashioned apprenticeship — if they still exist — by which they could start earning a living and some self-respect.
But the real enemy of happiness isn’t just the pressure of sitting exams that many are completely unsuited to taking, it’s the idea that there is no alternative route into adulthood. Forced in on themselves, and into more and more cerebral pursuits instead of physical ones, it is no wonder so many teenagers, despite their material privileges, become sunk in apathy and self-pity.
They can’t be wholly blamed for this — after all, who is there telling them that there is a world elsewhere in which they will find purpose and happiness? Not schools, driven by league tables, nor parents, cowed by the prospect of perennially unemployable offspring.
You can’t make camp fires and dance round them, as the kids in That’ll Teach ’Em did, because that’s what little children, whose world teenagers despise, like doing. You can’t do sport unless you’re either at a private school or attending one of the decreasing number of state schools that still has a playing field. The old kind of clubs, such as the Scouts and Guides, are terminally uncool. No wonder the only alternative looks like Prozac or the binges on drink, drugs and under-age sex for which our young are infamous.
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Only 5% of the mental health budget is targeted at under-16s, which (to anyone who remembers how rotten being 14 can feel) seems amazing. Yet the solution to this kind of problem shouldn’t lie just with government budgets and targets, but in ourselves.
When I was planning as a teenager, on a daily basis, how to kill myself, I was rescued by a quiet, wise man called David Butcher who taught woodwork. Being encouraged to do something practical made an incalculable difference to my moods. As soon as you can see something that was just a lump of wood become a bowl or a box, your own wispy sense of identity and sanity suddenly gets a great jolt of life-giving realism.
All kinds of unhappy teenagers, including the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, benefited from his lessons. He was one of the only teachers at my horrible progressive school to be called “Mr” Butcher, rather than by his first name. We also benefited from his belief that we should get off our privileged bottoms and do some charitable work.
There is nothing quite like seeing people in a much worse situation than you to put your angst in perspective. Perhaps the worst thing about depression is that it makes you completely apathetic, like the spectres in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials or the Dementors in Harry Potter.
The very thing that offers your only chance of getting better — doing something — is the thing that, above all, seems impossible. When you’re having a bad time you become enraged at being told to snap out of it.
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It’s paradoxical that teenagers, who are pumped full of hormones telling them to dance, fight and have sex, are often the ones to suffer most from this horrible feeling.
Yet the moment you see how much worse off a pensioner incapacitated by arthritis or a child dying of Aids is, it does become impossible to feel truly, madly, deeply sorry for yourself again.
Prince Harry is an extreme version of the way forward for kids who, left to drift at home with a gigantic sense of failure, sink into drunken loutishness unless redirected outward. The world is bigger than you are, and the moment you realise that is when you start to become a grown-up.
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India Knight is away