I am 100% behind Dr Alf with his critique of the Guardian. From people rarely being mentally ill in the 1950s, through to the 1990s and people knowing that they were boys or girls and were heterosexual or not, we are now faced with gender fluidity, transgenderism, people struggling to assert their identity. This, we are told, has led to confusion, depression and the growth of every conceivable mental affliction to the point where every school will require a mental health nurse, as will every workplace, assuming these children eventually get jobs. We are told that in the population as a whole that one person in four will suffer from mental illness at some time in their life, and Dr Alf may find it interesting to know that this is reported in papers other than the Guardian, which is left-wing and derives much of its advertising revenue from recruiting teachers, nurses, charity workers, thespians and local government. The Guardian has a vested interest in promoting the interests of these workers and the need for taxpayers to find more money to recruit more of them. Thus, they exaggerate the problems to create pressure to meet the need amongst other newspapers and media outlets. With Aids, which people don’t talk about much these days, the Guardian was so successful in whipping up a frenzy that the number of Aids advisors, counsellors and experts exceeded the number of Aids patients by a margin of 8 to 1. It is true that food additives, the ingestion of junk food and too much sugar, salt and e numbers are contributing to unhealthiness as are so-called recreational drugs peddled to schoolchildren by drug dealers not much older than themselves. The schools do not help by encouraging boys to wear skirts and pandering to a soft agenda whereby lessons have to have “wow factor”, there are few male role models (most teachers are woman and again left-wing), there is “differentiated ” teaching, whereby everyone has to move at the pace of the least intelligent, and teachers with large class sizes are heard to say “Who is still writing” so as not to offend the sensibilities of the least bright pupil. There is also a problem with dysfunctional parents not feeding their children so that they fall asleep in class or are too tired to learn. All that aside, the idea that 25% of all children, or all people, are at some stage of their lives mentally ill is excessive. The rise to the 25% figure in adults corresponds precisely to changes brought about by the Government in the eligibility rules for receipt of invalidity benefit, its successor, incapacity benefit, and its latest manifestation, Personal Independence Payments. Each of those benefits were claimed in the past by people who had “bad backs” and when GPs and the BMA refused to allow benefit fraud investigators into their surgeries as spies masquerading as patients, people claiming these benefits suddenly discovered “mental illness” as the new “elixir” to the world of benefits. The Guardian, throughout these changes, opposed each one of them in editorials filled with moral indignation. They are now, doing the same thing in this latest attempt to pull at the heartstrings of taxpayers, just before the latest Phil Hammond budget. John Gelmini