Ask any parent, teacher or GP and they will tell you young people seem to be doing worse, mentally, than they used to. <\/p>\n
National surveys back them up. <\/p>\n
The share of Australians aged 16\u201324 reporting a mental health problem in the past year jumped from<\/a> about 25% in 2007 to almost 40% by 2020\u201322.<\/p>\n In the United Kingdom, the proportion of people aged 17\u201319 with a \u201cprobable mental disorder\u201d rose from<\/a> one in ten in 2017 to almost one in six in three years. <\/p>\n Similar trends emerge in Canada<\/a>, the United States<\/a> and many other countries with surveys that track mental health.<\/p>\n But are young people really doing worse? Or are they simply more willing to admit they\u2019re struggling?<\/p>\n Our new study<\/a>, which has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication in the Journal of Population Economics, provides some answers.<\/p>\n Taboos are lifting<\/p>\n Talking about mental health has become far less taboo over the past two decades. Schools teach emotional wellbeing<\/a>. Kids and adolescents hear about campaigns such as \u201cR U OK Day<\/a>\u201d. Celebrities openly discuss depression<\/a>. Social media is full of conversations<\/a> that previous generations rarely had.<\/p>\n So when surveys show young people report much poorer mental health than previous generations did at the same age, we wanted to know how much reflects real change and how much reflects a cultural shift in what they report.<\/p>\n So we analysed more than two decades of nationally representative Australian data, following almost 270,000 survey responses collected between 2002 and 2023.<\/p>\n We used the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia<\/a> survey, which has followed the same families every year since 2001, asking about their mental health, money, relationships and major life events. <\/p>\n We tracked what people said about their mental health. We also estimated what we would expect their mental health to look like based on many well-established risk factors. These include their physical health, financial stress, employment, life events and childhood circumstances.<\/p>\n Comparing these two measures allowed us to separate changes in underlying mental health from changes in how willing different generations are to report distress.<\/p>\n