Adolescent mental health is one of the most difficult areas in medicine. All parents know that teenage life can be painful. Self-doubt, low self esteem, extreme envy and sexual fantasies can make life unbearable for the whole family. Outside the normal distribution of behaviour can lie serious depression or anxiety. Unless recognised and treated promptly disaster can strike - self-harm and suicide, educational failure and destructive parental relationships. Identifying these outliers is the problem. But to do so requires something the NHS is very short of - time.

Psychiatrists are used to working in areas where disease does not come in boxes such as a heart attack, stroke or cancer. Instead there is a sliding scale from normality into a spectrum of depression, agitation, eating disorders, body image issues, bipolar, schizophrenia and psychosis. Extreme forms can be dramatic, often requiring urgent hospital admission even against the patient's will. But many need rapid straightforward intervention at home with counselling, behavioural therapy and for some, drugs.

The NHS struggles to provide even a basic service according to this study. The services have been dumbed down - using on-line questionnaires rather than a zoom call with a living person. Indeed the most shocking finding in the STADIA trial was that at 18 months after referral to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service, less than half had received any intervention at all.

Unlike many branches of medicine this is not a dramatic speciality. It's not the subject of TV programmes nor any dashing around in helicopters. But we just have to do better. When the NHS can prescribe drugs costing over £10,000 a shot to very elderly cancer patients in their last months of life I really wonder if we've got our priorities right.

Professor Karol Sikora is a Consultant Oncologist and fomer Director of the World Health Organisation's Cancer Programme.