A sharp rise in cases of children struggling with anxiety, depression and self-harm or suicidal thoughts has been reported by head teachers.
Worries over cyberbullying, family relationships and friendship tensions at school have also become more prevalent, heads said.
School leaders said they were finding it harder to find specialist support and mental health care for pupils with greater needs, making the scale of the problem worse.
Head teachers and a children’s charity appealed to the government to deliver on its pledge to improve mental health care by reversing cuts in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS).
Eating disorders, body image anxieties, hyperactivity, compulsive behaviour, problems with sleeping, bed-wetting and substance addiction have all risen in the past five years, heads said.
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A survey by the the Association of School and College Leaders, the heads’ union, conducted with the National Children’s Bureau and released on the first day of the association’s annual conference in Birmingham, highlighted the rise. It was completed by 338 heads and deputies. Signs of stress among pupils were the most commonly cited by 18 per cent of heads, followed by pupils’ friendships (16 per cent), family difficulties (12 per cent) and depression (11 per cent).
Although other examples were less prevalent, heads reported a large increase in a wider range of mental health issues in the past five years. After anxiety, depression and cyberbullying, the biggest increases were in self-harm or suicidal thoughts and eating disorders or body anxieties.
Malcolm Trobe, the union’s interim general secretary, said: “The fact is that children today face an extraordinary range of pressures. They live in a world of enormously high expectations, where new technologies present totally new challenges such as cyberbullying.
“There has seldom been a time when specialist mental health care is so badly needed and yet it often appears to be the poor relation of the health service.”
Anna Feuchtwang, chief executive of the National Children’s Bureau, said it was “alarming” that heads were reporting such a rise in self-harm and suicidal thoughts among pupils.
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She said: “While schools are doing their best to help, in cases where children are in acute need they require specialist mental health services to step in and provide support. Unfortunately, teachers say that limited capacity in these services often makes referrals very difficult.”
Many schools offer some form of support to students on their premises, such as visits by counsellors or educational psychologists, but head teachers said there was less money to pay even for these. Almost two-thirds (65 per cent) said they were finding it harder to arrange specialist mental health care for pupils from local services. Eighty per cent of heads and deputies who responded to the survey said that they wanted expanded child mental health services in their area.