Five Shocks Caused Lasting UK Mental Health Decline, Study Finds — SkimNews
Get the Health newsletter
Daily health & science — research, biotech, public health, the studies worth knowing. Free.
- UCL researchers, led by Dr Annie Jeffery, analysed UK Household Longitudinal Study data from 87,857 people aged 16+ between 2009 and 2024 and identified five "systemic shocks" — Brexit, the first and second Covid lockdowns, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the Truss mini-budget — as each causing immediate damage to overall mental wellbeing.
- The first Covid lockdown in March 2020 had the largest single impact, equating to roughly 900,000 more people in total visiting a family doctor for depression symptoms, while the Brexit referendum added the equivalent of about 120,000 more people seeking GP help for depression.
- Russia's invasion of Ukraine drove about 15,000 more Britons per month to seek GP help for depression, and Liz Truss's September 2022 mini-budget added roughly 23,000 more monthly GP visits, with researchers describing the post-2022 increases as "insidious" and persistent.
- Psychological distress in the UK had been climbing since 2009 but accelerated from 2015 onward, and the heightened post-shock distress has not returned to the much lower pre-2016 baseline, according to the BMJ Mental Health study.
- NHS England saw the number of people in contact with mental health services nearly double from 2.64 million in 2016-17 to 4.13 million in 2024-25, while new monthly referrals jumped 47% from 360,000 in April 2022 to 530,000 by July 2026.
- Prof Peter Fonagy's long-awaited government-commissioned inquiry into rising diagnoses of mental illness, ADHD and autism — published Friday alongside the study — comes as a record 2.8 million Britons are recorded as too sick to work and almost 1 million 16-24 year-olds are Neets.
- The Centre for Mental Health estimates mental ill-health costs the UK £300 billion a year, with chief executive Andy Bell attributing rising distress to overlapping shocks compounded by years of austerity that left fewer buffers against them.
Why it matters: The findings arrive as the government prepares to publish Prof Fonagy's inquiry into a record 2.8 million Britons too sick to work, giving policymakers concrete evidence that the mental health surge traces to identifiable political and economic shocks rather than just expanded diagnostic criteria. With NHS mental health contacts nearly doubling since 2016-17 and the Centre for Mental Health pegging the annual cost at £300 billion, the political decisions behind those shocks now have a quantified footprint.
Ask SkimNews
