The saddest story I’ve ever heard, in more than 20 years of writing about people’s most personal and traumatic family events, was the tale of a young girl aged 15 who took her own life. She’d been such a happy toddler, her mum told me through her tears; things had started to go downhill when she was 11, and she was pulled back from the brink several times before her eventual death.

As with every suicide, that teenager’s decision to end her life had many root causes. It’s this complexity that’s terrifying – and there’s plenty to be terrified about. Referrals by GPs for mental health problems in under-18s were a third higher last year than in the two years previously; currently, around 400,000 under-18s are in contact with the NHS for mental health issues. There were 177 suicides among 15- to 19-year-olds in 2017, compared with 110 in 2010; and the number of young people who are self-harming has risen dramatically, up 42 per cent between 2006 and 2015.

As the mother of four children in their teens and early twenties, and surrounded by friends and acquaintances with youngsters, these unsettling statistics have made the leap from newspaper pages to our real lives: both my children and I have known people affected directly by the epidemic of mental health problems. It’s incredibly sad, and also extremely scary, to be up close to young people who should have everything to look forward to, and who instead are hampered by depression and who have self-harmed, or even tried to take their own lives.