Headline after headline paints a troubling picture: young people battling anxiety, depression, and insomnia, often with their phones as constant bedtime companions. Dubbed “generation anxiety,” these so-called digital natives have grown up tethered to their screens. But I wanted to dig deeper—was there solid data to prove the link?
I got started by perusing the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) data. This site is a goldmine for tracking who’s been prescribed what, when, and where across England. It’s like a medicine cabinet inventory, where every pill, potion, and prescription is accounted for–but for the entire nation. I started with the English Prescribing Data (EPD) and Prescription Cost Analysis (PCA) datasets.
To my surprise, I found that in just one year doctors in England had issued over 810,000 prescriptions for sleeping medications to children under 16. That is a worrying 13 percent higher than the figure reported for the 12 months prior.
Of those 810,000 hypnotic prescriptions for sleepless children, nearly 80,000 were given to kids aged five and under. Five-year-olds. This wasn’t just a case of restless teenagers tossing and turning before exams—this was a generation of kids, some still learning to tie their shoelaces, being prescribed hypnotics.
Digging further, the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) —a sort of logbook for every trip to hospital in England—revealed hundreds of hospital admissions for sleep disorders in children and teens.
To put the numbers into context, I spoke with Dr. Susie Davies, a GP and founder of Parents Against Phone Addiction in Young Adolescents. She told me that nearly three-quarters of teens take their phones to bed, potentially a major culprit behind sleepless nights in her view. I also reached out to Professor Frank Furedi, author of Paranoid Parenting, who criticised the growing tendency of medics to reach for the prescription pad to address what he sees as normal childhood struggles.
This investigation was published as an exclusive in the Sunday Express on January 12, 2025.
