Welcome to the digital couch

“Texting an on-off boyfriend that I was pregnant after he dumped me,” sighs Rayner, matter-of-factly. “Poor guy. I thought it would bring him back. But it didn’t.” What it did do – and this goes for every last one of Lawson and Rayner’s self-destructive low points – is, they say, equip them with some pretty special qualifications. Their messy life stories, they claim, make them expertly poised to hand out advice to today’s younger generation.

“We’ve been there,” is the unique advantage that Rayner, now 27, and Lawson, 29, have over traditional therapists whose unsolved cases often wind up, they say, at their door. Not to mention the full gamut of mod cons that Generation Y women grew up with and therefore now expect of their gurus: one-to-one Skype sessions, weekly email bulletins, daily email contact, tweets every few hours. Theirs, they say, is a digitally-enabled detox.

When they started out in business together Lawson and Rayner were convinced a woman in her twenties in need of emotional growth would relate to them. They started putting out weekly three-minute videos on YouTube: Life Nuggets, they called them, “about something that’s going on in one of our lives, something where we’ve f***ed up or something we’re struggling with”. They began offering one-to-one counselling sessions on Skype as part of a package, Cure Your Quarter-life Crisis. They came up with a hashtag for Twitter, #getaddictedtothegoodstuff – the “good stuff” no longer being high-grade cocaine or delicious boys with come-hither personas. Clients are given four-word mantras and a daily homework between tutorials.

Their clients, they tell me, tend to be female. (A report published in The Lancet last year suggested that girls are almost twice as likely as boys to suffer depression or anxiety.) “Most of it,” Lawson explains, “is, ‘I don’t feel good enough’; ‘I’m not happy with my body.’ But the main thing is relationships. ‘I want a relationship.’ ‘I’m broken-hearted.’ ” It’s for this reason that clients are made to do an inventory of their past relationships. “The positive qualities in him. Negative qualities in him. Why did the relationship end? What were the issues that kept coming up? And almost everyone,” Rayner says, “without fail, is like, ‘Oh my God.’ It’s so obvious when it’s on paper.” Once they see the patterns, they can choose what to do about it.

“Some of our girls,” Rayner says, “are using antidepressants and feeling that’s not working. We’ve got a couple of clients who use antidepressants and also take Ecstasy, so they’re trying to balance out their week on antidepressants and then, on the weekend, they’re getting high and feeling terrible, wondering why they’re feeling so off balance ... We never anticipated the number of girls who have come to us, not because they are in the depths of an addiction, but because they’re just really unhappy.”

A six-week course, with daily contact and six one-hour sessions, costs £499. It seems like a lot of money to me but, they say, it’s only a fraction of the amount their fragile clients would otherwise be spending on their holiday in Ibiza or, cumulatively, at Topshop.

They also offer individual sessions, plus monthly follow-ups, for anyone who’s done their six-week Quarter-life Crisis package. “And, actually,” says Lawson, “we wanted to put a value on it, because this is life-changing. If it cost 100 quid, people wouldn’t value it – they wouldn’t put in the work. And it is valuable work.” A forthcoming book, out next May, will be a cheaper alternative.

Neither Lawson nor Rayner have any qualifications, not from any actual institutions, not counting the university of life. Does it matter? The simple answer is that life coaches have never needed qualifications anyway, and Lawson and Rayner don’t claim to be therapists.

But there’s a longer answer, too. It goes something like this: if you’re a woman under 30 in the middle of an emotional meltdown, why would you want to sit in a dimly lit room opposite an internet-illiterate old-school therapist, or wade through some Nineties-era American self-help classic, or sit for ever on an NHS waiting list, or be fobbed off with antidepressants by your GP, when you can have “Life Nuggets” in your inbox right now, face-to-face counselling (albeit two-dimensional) without leaving the comfort of your flat-share and email bulletins on the real subjects that bother you, such as This Is Why You Were Cheated On?

This could be the future of self-help, personal development, robust mental “healthfulness”, as some Americans, and therefore some of the British also, have come to say. It’s what young people want, no, expect, no, desperately need. And, of course, it’s not only Rayner and Lawson who have noticed.

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I am at Olympia in west London at a mind/body/spirit/wellbeing event. At 3pm, Lawson and Rayner will be giving a seminar on the first floor, under their professional mantle, Addictive Daughter. Armed with the hard life lessons they’ve learnt, they’re going to tell me how to change my life in 21 days. I am here because I want to know more about how the young women who come to see Lawson and Rayner are dealing with the difficult aspects of their lives. There isn’t a day that goes by that there isn’t some report in the paper or online about rising anxiety levels among teenagers and twentysomethings, about online bullying, eating disorders, self-harm and, chiefly, the effects of growing up in a digitalised world where the private has become public, and where you can do strange new things such as hang out with your friends while sitting at home on your own, actually feeling very lonely.

It’s not surprising that all sorts of people are thinking up new ways to reach Generation Y and solve their problems, even if the things they are coming up with are usually untested, possibly unsafe, potentially useless: this is uncharted territory and demand is big, urgent, maybe limitless. But it’s not just people like Lawson and Rayner exploring it. There are psychiatrists, psychotherapists, academics, school and university heads, even computer games specialists, coming up with new tools that many young people say are more relevant to the way they experience life.

To better understand how young people are coping with the pressures they’re under, I visit chat rooms such as Big White Wall, Psych Central and Mind’s Elifriends, where Gen Y airs its secret problems. I’m impressed by how fluent its members are in the language of psychology. They know all the terms and syndromes. “Abandonment.” “Attachment theory.” “Codependency.” The main problem, though, is “stress”, partly because stress can mean anything now, from exasperated to homicidal.

I talk to young bloggers (special subjects: their struggle with depression or dating or overeating) and have the weird experience of not talking to them, too – one girl who blogs publicly about her struggle with anxiety is too anxious to talk to me about her blog on the phone. Her age group are keen self-diagnosers. They don’t need their doctors to tell them they’re suffering from generalised anxiety disorder, or that their parents are narcissists (hence their abandonment complex).

There are self-help apps directed at this age group. Mood Tracker is popular: you input how you’re feeling every day and get a graph of your ups and downs over time. I talk to the people behind Headspace, an app that shows you how to apply mindfulness to “the fast-paced world we inhabit today”, set up by a former Buddhist monk and a friend who worked in advertising. A third of Headspace’s 3 million subscribers are under 30. The actress Emma Watson, 25, loves it. I play cognitive behavioural therapy video games, modelled on Tomb Raider, that teach young, shy, agoraphobic computer geeks how to talk to girls.

At 3pm a queue starts filing into the Addictive Daughter room. Rayner and Lawson appear on stage, looking fabulous. Rayner has had her hair dip-dyed. Lawson is wearing skinny white jeans. They tell their stories: they’ve been there, done that, hit rock bottom, then they’ve been there and done it again. Take Rayner: she is telling the audience about her own, outwardly privileged childhood – she was raised by a succession of nannies. Until she was 23, this aspiring actress used to get so drunk that she would wake up in bed next to men she could swear she’d never laid eyes on before. What had happened? Was it consensual? Who is this person? These were the frightened, remorseful questions she would ask herself through her hangover.

Now she’s teetotal and about to get married. “It may sound cool to say you have a new boyfriend,” she says. “It is not so cool to say, ‘I’m a chronic codependent.’ ” The audience nods: nobody needs to be told what a codependent is. Rayner started drinking from about the age of 12. “For me,” she says, “I never ever imagined there was a possibility that you could live and not drink.” Unfortunately, in Britain, there’s nothing unusual about that mindset, she says.

It’s Lawson’s go next. She was a different kind of binge drinker, a bragger who drank to feel better and tell a good story. She talks about the bad situations she would get herself in: for example, the time she followed her non-English-speaking Russian “boyfriend” to his homeland where they often ended up blind-drunk in the streets of Moscow punching each other. (She’d met him at a party. Their eyes had locked; minutes later, they were doing it in a cupboard.)

Lawson’s dreams of being an actress were thwarted but her drama school training has given her a commanding presence. “Anyone recognise self-sabotage?” She throws the question to the audience like a dare. A handful of women timidly raise their hands. “The only solace we had,” Lawson says, “was each other, and we concentrated on boys and booze, and that made us feel better ...” “And,” Rayner completes the thought, “was also the cause of all the problems.”

Toxic relationships, childhood drama, validation, shame-based culture, emotional triggers, today’s consumerist culture, the difference between ego and self-worth – they run the gamut of today’s psycho-jargon. “I really believe that rock bottom is a blessing,” Lawson says.

The talk is opened up to the floor. A woman asks what to do about her cheating boyfriend, possibly hoping that Rayner or Lawson will tell her he’ll change. Lawson smiles benignly and breaks some crushing news: “You can’t change anyone but yourself.” A woman in her late forties puts up her hand. “I wish,” she says, “that I had known what you know at your age.”

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Sarah Brennan is chief executive of YoungMinds, Britain’s leading charity committed to improving the mental wellbeing of young people and children. If anyone knows what is going on in the minds of the under-30s, it is her. “There’s been a very, very distinct and rapid increase in young people’s diagnosis of anxiety and depression, including self-harm and eating disorders,” she says. You can see that just by looking at the number of SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) prescriptions – antidepressants – that GPs are making.

She calls it “the pressure cooker generation”, and points to cyberbullying, the impact of school stress and a contracted jobs market for some of the problems she hears young people talking about. Brennan also mentions something about the current young generation that no one else I talk to has brought up: the rates of family breakdown. “You have to go back to what children need to develop good mental health: attachment, consistency, continuity and boundaries.

And some of those things do get worse with family breakdown.” The Centre for Social Justice released figures last year showing that more children have a smartphone than have a father living at home.

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It’s time for Lawson and Rayner to tell me their stories in more detail, in a private members’ club. It’s their choice of venue: a mirror of the aspirational values of their generation.

Rayner and Lawson started out in business together (they describe themselves as social entrepreneurs) by blogging and vlogging about their own issues – reaching out to other women their age, who found themselves in similar circumstances.

Rayner and Lawson’s circumstances were these: they’d been best friends since they were both at the Central School of Speech and Drama when Rayner told Lawson’s boyfriend that she was in love with him. This was in 2010 – “Our year of hell.” That’s exactly the kind of “dark place” Rayner was in at the time. They’d all been at a party. And they’d all been very drunk and high. It had been a dark place, come to think of it, that they were both inhabiting at the time – not that, to use the phrasing of their chosen field, they knew it consciously.

All they knew, consciously, was that they had fallen out and were going their different ways. The way they did this was identical: partying, drinking, drugs, mess, boys, boy-related mess, blackouts, tears, regrets, stress-related acne, weight gain, weight loss, repeat. One day in May 2012 both of them were, separately, dumped by their respective boyfriends. Rayner punched hers in the face in a cafe in King’s Cross. Lawson just wanted to die, but rang Rayner instead.

“There’s a book,” Lawson says, “have you heard of it, Women Who Love Too Much? That book is incredible. It’s a classic.” It was a revelation for her. Reading it – this was when she was in Thailand on detox, attempting to shift the two stone she’d put on during a two-month acting job in Shanghai – she finally understood why she had always been attracted to alcoholic men. Because they were unavailable, she read. Because she was codependent, she learnt. She lacked self-worth, a state of affairs – she now found out – stemming from her outwardly very privileged childhood and a complicated bond with her parents. “The reason my relationships were so bloody unhealthy was because my relationship with myself was awful.”

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Does online therapy actually work? John Grohol, who set up Psych Central in 1995, talks to me on the phone from San Francisco. “It has been around for 20 years and research shows that it can be as effective a modality as face to face,” he says. Sarah Brennan disagrees: “It can be effective, but it seems to be the case that it does not replace face-to-face counselling. I mean, the evidence is still very much still emerging and skyping your counsellor could be very good, but it’s not the same as seeing a two-dimensional version of a person.”

Of all the people I speak to about the under-thirties, I like Brennan the best. She’s realistic without being depressing; she’s hopeful without trying to sell me “the solution”, whatever that might be. “There has been a lot of anxiety and a lot of talk from professionals about how to use online help and do it safely and well, but it has been quite slow taking off. Young people do find peer support really helpful, but those are the sites that are often not managed or moderated. Among professionals and organisations, we can see the risks straightaway. But young people are much less risk-averse than we are. We’re in a completely different world when it comes to communication, so the boundaries are just not there.”

Grohol tells me that research on “millennials” is still very scant. His advice? “Anything on the internet that claims to treat or diagnose a mental disorder is not going to be effective,” he says, “unless it’s been through a review process.” For anyone looking for a life coach online, “I would encourage you to find someone with direct experience of treating people for the thing they say they can treat you for.”

Something that Brennan tells me stays in my head. “Up to the age of 30, your brain is still developing,” she says. “You’re still developing as a person; you’re much more open to influences.” Perhaps if I’d been a bit younger, I’d have completed Rayner and Lawson’s 21-day challenge and found my calling as an online therapist to my peers, with a string of bestselling pay-per-view blogs and mantras to my name. But for that to have happened, I would have to have been in my twenties, with all the new anguish that goes with them.

With respect, Generation Y: rather you than me.

Stressed? The anxiety app with NHS approval

Dr Andrés Fonseca is a clinical psychiatrist of 16 years’ standing, an honorary lecturer at University College London and a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He is also a businessman and innovator: his speciality is developing evidence-based digital treatment for anxiety disorders. CCBT is the science behind his creations – computerised cognitive behavioural therapy. “IT’S OK NOT TO BE OK” it says in big capitals on his company Virtually Free’s home page.

Stress Free is the best known of Fonseca’s apps. It has been approved by the NHS, which is more than you can say for many of its app competitors. On Stress Free, a bearded virtual doctor – Dr Freeman – lolls in a deckchair under a palm tree and teaches his patients four medically proven relaxation techniques. If your problems are more specific, you can try Fonseca’s Phobia Free or Agoraphobia Free apps and, if you’re patient, you will soon be able to try Fonseca’s virtual reality treatment helmet to learn how to speak in public or get over your agoraphobia – virtual reality exposes you to fully immersive situations you can explore without fear of consequences.

“Young people want to be able to take their mental health into their own hands,” he tells me. “They want to be able to get help in a time frame and place that suits them. They have a particular experience with online shopping: if I buy book, I can have it tomorrow. So why can’t I have access to my healthcare in the same way?” By and large, he tells me, “Younger people tend to be more open and accepting about these issues and have built some kind of language around it. Older people may present me with a physical health concern instead.”

Fonseca is developing computer games as mental health aids with his colleague, Richard Flower, a specialist who cut his teeth on Tomb Raider and Theme Park. “With our games, there is a storyline that unfolds that challenges you on your fears,” Fonseca explains. He gives the example of someone suffering from depression: their goals might be to go out, get a job and find a partner, but they feel incapacitated. “You need techniques to help you. You need a challenge [in the game] that is based on your fear of going out. So, in the game, you are fighting your automatic negative thoughts: ‘I can’t go out of the house because I am a useless person nobody wants. Everybody hates me.’ You might even be shooting those thoughts dead.”

The big innovation in self-help, says Fonseca, is prevention. “A lot of students want to improve their academic performance, so the idea of preventing something like anxiety later on is like eating healthily to prevent heart disease.” Twelve per cent of the population will have a clinical anxiety problem sometime in their life. It makes sense to deal with it early, he says.

Fonseca’s ideas – innovative and tuned into the younger generation – also happen to dovetail with a cash-strapped NHS, for whom a robust, effective mental health app is the holy grail – a way to cut back overstretched and costly face-to-face services. No wonder last month the life sciences minister, George Freeman, launched a £650,000 prize fund for the development of new mental health apps for the NHS.

Shoot credits
Styling: Prue White
Hair and make-up: Julia Wren at Mandy Coakley using Tom Ford and Davines