Why empathy matters

Yesterday the Guardian reported that more than 500 children a day in England are being referred to NHS mental health services for anxiety. That is more than double the rate before the Covid pandemic began when numbers were already high. The report says experts think this may only be the tip of the iceberg because many children are not seeking the help they need. The impact on their parents is considerable too.

The article speculated on the reasons, including academic pressures – especially exam-related ones, social media, bullying [including racist bullying], feelings of insecurity about their appearance, widening inequality, growing poverty and the cost of living crisis. Other factors mentioned are social isolation [with children living increasingly online] and long waiting lists for help.

While Covid-related isolation has been widely discussed, what the reports often don’t mention are the other experiences that many suffered during the pandemic, including fear about death and dying – themselves and their family – and bereavement. After all, Covid was not just about isolation; it was about why we were isolating and that often gets lost in the discussions about the lockdowns.

If, as adults, we were worried about our families and parents and others, that would also have amplified young people’s fears in the same way as our response as adults to social media and consumer pressures also affect them. Unfortunately, on the cost of living front, the sense that we are far from out of the woods remains.

So what do we do about young people’s anxiety in a world which has multiple ways of increasing it? How do we teach them that they matter as individuals, not as marketable commodities, that the world can be changed for the better, that most people are kind despite all the nastiness online and sometimes in person?

With so many causes, there is surely not just one way to make a difference. Every positive step counts. A good beginning is to emphasise empathy. When my daughter was killed, we were told that the driver was angry with her, unbelievably, since she was merely crossing the road while he went through two red lights, was driving on both sides of the road at high speed and drove right into her when she jumped back. He was, we were told, having ‘victim empathy’ sessions. I was very dubious about these and I have no idea if they worked. I feel his lack of empathy was either baked in or it derived from a huge wall of denial and a complete failure to take responsibility for what he had done.

However, I do believe that we can encourage and promote empathy much more than we currently do. I think empathy can be role modelled from an early age, but it has to be done in a reciprocal way. That is why I set up a charity for mental health peer mentors in schools. The idea is to give young people someone near their own age to talk to who will listen to them with empathy. Not only that but the wider mission is to inculcate a spirit of empathy across the whole school. The charity – Talk2Nish.com – is named after my daughter Anisha because she was such an empathetic listener, to everyone, at least up to a point. Empathy is, of course, what we need at work too.

Young people are surrounded by pressure to do more, to be more. It is hard for them to switch off. No wonder many of them retreat into their own – often online – worlds, but those can be even darker than real life. We have to find ways to make the endlessly spinning world around them less pressured.

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