Mental health diagnoses are on the rise among young people. Should they be?

It’s tough to be a “normal” kid these days.

To be a kid today in our society “is to be closely monitored and scrutinized for your level of performance,” British child and adolescent psychiatrist and psychotherapist Sami Timimi writes in Searching for Normal: A New Approach to Understanding Mental Health, Distress, and Neurodiversity (Signal, 2025).

And “when things are judged ‘not right’ by someone, you can then be exposed to a variety of assessments and procedures to determine what’s wrong, broken and dysfunctional in you.”

Timimi, who has three decades of experience as a clinician and researcher and has written dozens of book chapters and several books, contends that young people are being medicalized for behaviours that might be considered entirely normal in other parts of the world