Professor Doolally and the snowflakes?

Monday blog

I watched a few minutes of the BBC’s Breakfast this morning while having my Earl Grey tea and piece of toast. The lead story was a report written by some professor – I’ll call him Professor Doolally for reasons which I hope will become clear.

Professor Doolally’s report claimed that young people today were reporting mental health problems because (according to Professor Doolally) they are having a more difficult life than any previous generation.

Here are some basic statistics of the supposed ‘youth mental health crisis’:

And here is the increase in reported mental health conditions among young people:

But let’s briefly test whether Professor Doolally might be right. Do young people nowadays have a more difficult life than:

• the generation which fought in WWII?
• the generation which fought in WWI?
• the generation sent to work in cotton mills or down mines at the age of seven or eight?
• the generations before that when disease and poverty were rife and life expectancy was 20 to 30 years lower than it is now?

I might be tempted to agree with Professor Doolally that the post-war baby-boomer generation possibly had a better life than today’s young people. After all, the economy was growing, there were jobs for most people and, perhaps importantly, we had a generation of politicians who had experienced the war and were genuinely patriotic unlike the self-serving, incompetent, UK-hating scum we now have ruling us.

I, of course, am not as highly qualified as the great Professor Doolally. But I would nevertheless humbly suggest that his report is a load of utter nonsense and that the BBC’s grovelling reporting is just another symptom of our increasingly snowflake, narcissistic society where nobody takes responsibility for anything and everyone sees themself as a victim of something or other and therefore believes they should get special treatment and even compensation for their imagined wrongs.

Incidentally, the second most ‘important’ story on the useless BBC Breakfast was a demand by teaching unions that Ofsted should no longer be permitted to grade schools on their performance. Yet another symptom of a snowflake society which seems allergic to anyone taking responsibility for anything?