Tatler UK - 09.2019

One mother discovered

that her 16-year-old had

been using since she was

12 – which, her other

daughter assured her,

is not at all unusual

We arrange to meet at the Royal Garden Hotel

in Kensington, where the annual London summit

of ICAAD (International Conferences on

Addiction and Associated Disorders) is underway.

It’s a bit like walking around a university careers

fair, except the stands are for luxury rehabs in

Thailand and Africa, with words like ‘the world’s

most exclusive’ and ‘five-star’ jumping out from

travel brochure-worthy images of far-flung places.

The big thing Sorensen has noticed is the rise

in use of prescription drugs, not only benzos, but

also study drugs – which is why, around exam

time, he gets calls from parents. Often children

are dual hooked, taking Valium to come off

Adderall after a long day revising. His response

to every case is different. And, he notes, it’s more

difficult to define the problem when a client is

young. ‘Teenagers are structured differently to

adults. Their brain chemistry, hormonal systems,

everything. So diagnosing one as “an addict” is

quite hard. They might be physically addicted

but a lot of “addictive” behaviour looks a lot like

teenage behaviour.’ And with addiction comes a

complex web of coexisting background conditions.

‘So you work with the families. And with the

schools. And with the friendship group. And

with the trust funds...’

Different places suit different personalities, be

it wilderness programmes in Utah, which provide

therapy in an outdoor setting, or traditional 12-

step programmes. What they have in common is

that they’re immensely expensive (£50-70,000

for 10 weeks at Yes We Can in Holland and

£30,000 a month in the States, Sorensen esti-

mates). Every teenager I speak to knows some-

one or even several people who have been to re-

hab, and – aside from a single mention of The

Priory – all went abroad, everywhere from Ari-

zona to North Carolina to South Africa. In the

UK, Child and Adolescent Mental Health Ser-

vices (CAMHS) does offer exceptional care – if

you can get it. ‘I love CAMHS,’ says Sorensen.

‘But everyone I know who works there is com-

pletely overstretched. They are the most amazing

professionals, but they’re exhausted and they

don’t have the resources. They don’t even have

access to the funding to provide you with the

level of care once they’ve identified it.’ There are

an estimated 1,500 CAMHS in-patient beds in

England; almost half are run by independent

providers, the largest of which is The Priory. And

while The Priory does treat children for a wide

variety of conditions (including eating disorders,

anxiety and depression) they do not treat chil-

dren under 18 for addiction. ‘The fact that you

have to send your kid to the US for treatment is

completely unreasonable,’ Sorensen says. ‘We

should have hundreds of adolescent private

beds.’ There is at least a glimmer of hope: the

first NHS clinic to treat cannabis psychosis in

young people has just opened in south London.

A

manda is one of many

parents outraged by the

lack of care available in

Britain. When her 16-year-

old daughter presented with

a severe ketamine addiction, Amanda realised

very quickly that her best chance was to be

sent for residential treatment in Los Angeles.

The decision to send her daughter abroad

‘wasn’t a punishment,’ Amanda says, ‘it was a

constructive attempt to unravel and get to the

root of everything and give our daughter the

tools to have a fulfilling and^ normal life after-

wards – hopefully. There are no guarantees.’

She continues, ‘By the time she went, there was

a tremendous sense of relief because she’d had

this terrible depression. What we didn’t know

was that she was medicating with drugs, but

that was the root cause of her unhappiness.

There was an awful lot to unravel and we

couldn’t fix her.’

from their schools. As Liv – who, until now, has

spoken fairly dispassionately – says angrily,

schools need to be asking ‘why these pupils are

doing drugs. No happy person is addicted to

drugs, you’re only addicted to drugs when you

have a deep-seated problem or a hole in your

heart that you’re trying to cover up.’ She mentions

friends who don’t have access to therapy self-

medicating with Xanax, which, she says, ‘can

numb your pain’. Or, as Harry puts it, ‘mental

health – it’s everywhere. Everybody has some

issue’. And it’s not as though the adverse effects

of drugs on mental health are limited to the

years of active using; a study this year by Oxford

University has found that smoking cannabis as

a teenager could increase the risk of depression

in adulthood by 37 per cent.

The fact that these teenagers speak so openly

about mental health is encouraging – but it’s

also disturbing: drugs are taking their toll. When

I ask Emily if she thinks excessive drug use is

affecting her friends’ mental health she replies,

‘A hundred per cent, of course it is. People don’t

realise because you’re having such a good time

when you’re on it, and when you’re off it, you

feel shit, but most people already have some case

of anxiety or depression and it just feels a little

bit worse.’ Will also points out that when he was

cleaning up 10 years ago, there were very few

other people under 25 doing so. It’s different

now: ‘Maybe people are realising that they are

allowed to have a voice that says, “I’m not okay.”’

There has also, Will suggests, been a change in

the perception of what it means to be an addict.

‘Your life doesn’t have to be in a certain level of

disorder for you to be there. It’s simply down to a

desire to not be doing this anymore. And I think

that has helped a lot of younger people come in.’

The removal of stigma around drug use also

means that it’s not embarrassing for children

or parents to ask for help. When faced with

her daughter’s addiction, Amanda found that

she was able to be completely honest with her

friends and ask for advice. ‘I think there is

generally a culture of openness where we can

say to one another, “Do you know about this?

Do you know where I can get help?” People

judge less now.’

This openness is ‘the closest thing I’ve seen to

a preventative measure come about,’ says Will.

‘In a way, everyone’s waiting for each other to

stop doing drugs,’ says Tom. ‘Everyone is wait-

ing for someone to [be the first] to do it, but no

one is going to, so they’re all just carrying on.’

But equally, thinks Harry, ‘It’s just become so

normalised.’ Peer pressure is the most potent

pressure of all, and no one experiences it like

teenagers. Because ultimately, a teenager can’t

be told what they can and can’t do. The most

you can do is show them that it’s okay to ask for

help – and hope they’ll figure it out. (

Schools have had to adapt to changes in the

national picture. Outgoing Head of Bryanston

Sarah Thomas works ‘to keep up to date with

the challenges involving young people because

we want to educate pupils, we want to have

the right measures in place to keep pupils safe

at school.’ In practical terms, this means more

training for staff, a beefed-up Personal, Social,

Religious Education (PSRE) programme in

which students engage every year of their

education – and the introduction of trained

dogs, brought in at regular, unpredictable

intervals. (The school’s policy still states that

any pupil involved in the consumption or

possession of drugs can expect to be expelled.)

But Thomas believes that a lot of pre-emptive

work can be done with the PSRE syllabus.

‘The whole social and national narrative has

changed. It’s moved away from lecturing to

engaging – which is a good thing.’

This engagement with mental health can

only be a positive step forward. And it’s some-

thing many of the teenagers I speak to demand

tatler.com Tatler September 2019

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