Brexit, Liz Truss's mini-budget and other shocks over the last 10 years have led to a serious and lasting deterioration in the UK population's mental health, research has found. Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the first and second Covid lockdowns also triggered big rises in psychological distress, as measured by the number of people with depression and anxiety.
Five systemic shocks examined
Researchers led by Dr Annie Jeffery of University College London used data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study of 87,857 people aged 16 and older, collected every year between 2009 and 2024, to estimate the mental health impact of those five systemic shocks. All five events caused immediate and serious damage to overall mental wellbeing across the UK, but the Brexit referendum in June 2016 and the first pandemic lockdown in March 2020 caused the most damage.
Their analysis of the GHQ-12 screening tool, which measures mental health, found that the UK's vote to leave the European Union led to an increase in overall mental ill-health equivalent to about 120,000 more people seeking a GP's help for depression. The first Covid lockdown, when the then prime minister Boris Johnson told people to stay at home, had a much larger impact, equating to about 900,000 more people in total visiting a family doctor because they had developed symptoms of depression.
Impact of Ukraine invasion and mini-budget
Russia's offensive against Ukraine in February 2022 led to about 15,000 more Britons a month seeking a GP's help for depression. After Liz Truss's mini-budget in September 2022, about 23,000 more people a month visited their family doctor because they were depressed.
Jeffery said: "The past decade or so has been tumultuous, shaped by multiple overlapping shocks and ongoing uncertainty and instability that have impacted mental health in Britain. We have shown that major government decisions and current global events can have substantial impacts on people's mental health."
Persistent distress and rising demand
The UCL-led team's findings, published in the journal BMJ Mental Health, found psychological distress had been increasing from 2009 to a clinically significant degree but accelerated from 2015 onwards. Even though the most recent of the five events occurred in 2022, heightened distress has persisted and not returned to the lower levels seen before 2016.
The findings come as Prof Peter Fonagy prepares to publish the report of his government-commissioned inquiry into dramatic increases in diagnoses of mental illness, ADHD and autism. It will be published on Friday amid concern that those conditions help explain why a record 2.8 million Britons are too sick to work and almost 1 million young people aged 16 to 24 have become Neets – not in education, employment or training.
Andy Bell, chief executive of the Centre for Mental Health thinktank, said: "There is clear evidence that Covid had a big impact on mental health. And it makes sense that the other 'shocks' listed here would do so, either directly, by making people feel less secure and less connected, or as after-effects, for example the cost of living crisis. It's also clear that rising distress in the population is not due to a single cause but the effect of all these things added together, made worse by years of austerity giving fewer buffers against 'shocks' like this."
Mental ill-health costs the UK £300bn a year, according to research by the thinktank. The total number of people in England in contact with NHS mental health services almost doubled from 2.64 million in 2016-17 to 4.13 million in 2024-25. The number of new referrals the NHS receives every month has jumped from 360,000 in April 2022 to 530,000 in July 2026 – a jump of 47%.
The huge rise in demand for care, driven by shocks causing anxiety, stress and worry, has left NHS services struggling "as more people than ever are reaching out for support", said Tom Pollard, the mental health charity Mind's director of policy, campaigns and public affairs.
