One of the central arguments of Compass is that Britain is in a social recession. A growing consensus has developed that at the centre of the social recession are children and youth. One of the first signs was that something was going wrong in the lives of the young people was the Nuffield Foundation 2004 study, ‘Time Trends in Adolescent Mental Health’. It looked at three generations of fifteen year olds and identified a sharp decline in their mental health. What the study could not explain was the cause of this trend. It did note however that rising levels of adolescent mental illness coincided with improvements in economic conditions.