The problem with mental health awareness

<h3>Biography</h3> Dr Lucy Foulkes is an academic psychologist at the University of Oxford. She holds a Prudence Trust Research Fellowship and a NIHR Senior Research Fellowship. Her group researches mental health and social development in adolescence, with a particular focus on the possible negative consequences of increased public mental health awareness and school-based mental health interventions. Prior to Oxford, she completed her PhD and postdoc at UCL and moved on to a lectureship at University of York. In the past decade, there have been extensive efforts to raise public awareness about mental health problems, with the goal of reducing or preventing these symptoms across the population. Despite these efforts, reported rates of mental health problems have increased over the same period. In this talk, I present the hypothesis that, paradoxically, awareness efforts are contributing to this reported increase in mental health problems. I present emerging evidence to support this hypothesis, and consider the implications for the discourse on mental health in schools, universities and society.