UK distress stayed above pre-2016 levels after five national shocks, according to UCL panel data

The two large jumps are the firmest part of the evidence. The UCL team drew on the UK Household Longitudinal Study, which followed the same people and collected data every year from 2009 to 2024 ^[1]. A design like that lets a jump after a dated event be compared with the readings taken before it. Measured by the GP-visit equivalents the team reported, the rise in GHQ-12 scores after the March 2020 lockdown was about 7.5 times the rise after the June 2016 referendum ^[20][7].

The evidence that the harm lasted is weaker. According to the paper, published in BMJ Mental Health, distress was already rising from 2009 to a clinically significant degree and accelerated from 2015 ^[5][12]. That acceleration starts before the first of the five shocks ^[7]. The team found that distress has not returned to the much lower levels seen before 2016, even though the most recent event was in 2022 ^[4]. The thing this doesn't tell you is whether the plateau is what the shocks left behind or a steepening trend that simply kept going. The Guardian's account of the study does not describe how the model separated the two.

The 2022 events make attribution harder still. "We observed increased psychological distress immediately after the Brexit referendum and the first Covid-19 lockdown, with more insidious monthly increases in psychological distress after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the 2022 mini-budget," Jeffery said ^[3]. The invasion and the mini-budget were seven months apart ^[21], so two gradual increases overlap in time. Andy Bell, chief executive of the Centre for Mental Health, said the shocks could also act "as after-effects, for example the cost of living crisis" ^[18].

Bell sees the rise as cumulative. "It's also clear that rising distress in the population is not due to a single cause but the effect of all these things added together, made worse by years of austerity giving fewer buffers against 'shocks' like this," he said ^[15]. Jeffery was direct about the study's conclusion. "We have shown that major government decisions and current global events can have substantial impacts on people's mental health," Jeffery said ^[11]. I think that holds for the referendum and the first lockdown, where the jumps are large and dated. On the plateau, the panel data fit Bell's cumulative account at least as well as an account that credits five separate events ^[12][4].

Service counts in England point the same way, though the rise is smaller than the Guardian's wording suggests. The Guardian describes contacts with NHS mental health services in England as almost doubling, from 2.64 million in 2016-17 to 4.13 million in 2024-25 ^[6]. That is a rise of about 56% ^[19]. Those figures count people using services in one nation. The panel measures symptoms on a screening questionnaire across the UK ^[1][2].

The Fonagy inquiry is reporting amid concern that mental illness, ADHD and autism help explain why a record 2.8 million Britons are too sick to work and why almost 1 million people aged 16 to 24 are not in education, employment or training ^[13][14].