We don’t need to ask why young women are suffering mental health problems – it’s a direct result of the patriarchy

Young women today have impossible beauty ideals thrust at them from their palms, are at constant threat of misogyny and sexual violence, face racial discrimination and have their appearances dissected when they speak out against sexual assault

Instead of after-the-fact mental health treatment and kid gloves, we need to see systemic legal and social change (PA)

Young women are suffering a mental health crisis.

Nearly one in four has a mental illness, say the latest figures from NHS Digital. Analysing the data of 9,000 young people, the results showed that girls between the age of 17 and 19 were twice as likely as men to encounter depression and anxiety. An eye-opening comparison.

The review also found that children aged 11 to 19 who had mental health problems were more likely to be social media users. A third of those users spent over four hours a day on these platforms. It’s hardly surprising. Comparison, after all, is the thief of joy. Being bombarded daily with images of gym-sculpted bodies will do this to someone – that’s what advertising has always preyed on.

Social media is not the only culprit here.

This week also heralded the news that life expectancy for women in the poorest areas of England is falling due to insufficient care for preventable and treatable diseases. The gulf between wealthy and poor women is widening on an annual basis.

To compound this, women’s health issues are often overlooked.

The British Heart Foundation has just revealed that more than 8,200 women in England and Wales who died from heart attacks over the course of a decade could have survived if they’d had the same level of care as men. A BBC documentary this week revealed the catastrophic and under-researched mental health impact of the contraceptive pill. For the very same reasons, production of a male equivalent was halted.

With all this to contend with, is it any wonder young women are feeling the strain?

For many years, scientists couldn’t pinpoint why African Americans had such notably higher blood pressure than Caucasians – with black people having among the highest blood pressure in the world. Studies soon began to investigate this in conjunction with racial discrimination.

In 2006, researchers found a correlation between racism and gender-related vigilance (anticipatory stress), and cardiovascular risk – the latter increasing where the former was most present. In 2013, researchers at John Hopkins University released findings of their analysis of 266 patients in urban health clinics in Baltimore between 2003 and 2005. They found that just thinking about race resulted in increased blood pressure.

Researchers at Northwestern University followed more than 2,000 African Americans over the course of 25 years from 1985 living in racially divided neighbourhoods in Chicago, Minneapolis, Birmingham (Alabama) and Oakland. Those who had moved into more racially integrated neighbourhoods during this time had significantly lower blood pressure than those who remained in divided ones. They concluded that the raised markers in those who stayed could translate directly to thousands of heart attacks and strokes.

There’s no doubt about it, prejudice makes you ill.

We also know that abuse – the suffering or even the witnessing of – can be seen in the makeup of people’s very DNA. This year, Harvard published the results of a study that looked at men who had been abused as children. They found chemical markers in them that were non-existent in those who hadn’t suffered abuse. This physical effect of this trauma was then found in offspring.

It thus seems logical that young women today having impossible beauty ideals thrusted at them from their palms, being at constant threat of misogyny and sexual violence, facing racial discrimination and having their appearances dissected when they speak out against sexual assault… might also then develop severe mental health issues?

Instead of after-the-fact mental health treatment and kid gloves, we need to see systemic legal and social change that targets the heart of these problems: classing malicious sexist acts against women as hate crimes, injecting more funding into women’s medical care, teaching consent and gender issues to children from a young age, investigating how we can target online bullying and the impact of social media upon self-esteem.

Patriarchy is a plague upon women. Its toxicity is destroying their mental and physical health, so why are we still twiddling our thumbs wondering what could possibly be the cause of the suffering? The answer is writ large. These links are too close for us to ignore.