I had the opposite experience, students claiming to have attention deficit disorder and therefore needing extra time on exams - in that they were supported by their parents. I would be sceptical about a statistic like the OECD's increasing mental illness, since this would, presumably, reflect greater diagnosis of mental illness. A lot of the stigma against mental illness has fallen away. A friend of mine reported a case in Hove where the primary schools had an explosion of 'special needs' categorisations, after parents learned that their children could get extra help. Later on, something similar happened at my daughters' school. The school took on a new special needs consultant. Before her re-evaluation, there were around 20 of the 220 children at the school under the special needs category. After, she bumped up the figures to one quarter of the children having special needs. I was surprised that this was seen as a great victory at the school governors' meeting (because they could get more cash, you might think, cynically, but also because they said, at least, that it was a determination to address those special needs). I said I thought the estimate was rather high, but the head was insistent that this was typical for an inner london school. (It was a little high, but not that much). Special needs is not the same thing as mental illness, clearly, but here was a case where a change in the measure led to an increase in the incidence of special needs.