Writing in The Telegraph, Dalrymple argues that Britain’s so-called pandemic of anxiety is less a medical crisis than a political convenience, allowing the government to disguise rising youth unemployment by transferring the ranks of the jobless to those of the officially ill. He warns that a welfare state which rewards people for feeling unwell will inevitably produce a fragile, dependent population—and, eventually, serious social unrest.
The British welfare state is well on the way to creating more invalids than did the First World War. An entire generation, it seems, is suffering from shellshock: without, of course, ever having heard so much as a single shell whistle overhead.