Youth Mental Health: Challenging the Crisis Narrative

Crisis, epidemic, state of emergency – these are words we regularly hear when it comes to the mental health of young people. Young people are said to be snowflakes, taken aback by the slightest setback. They are driven by performance pressure and experience chronic stress. They are addicted to social media and are burdened by concerns about the climate, war and housing. Some fellow scientists are diagnosing anxiety disorders on the entire generation.

And yet the picture that the mental health of young people has collapsed in recent years requires nuance. Large-scale studies examining how common mental disorders are, the percentage of young people with such a disorder has hardly increased worldwide over the past thirty years – some studies up to the corona pandemic.

The number of young people who say they are ‘not feeling well’ has increased sharply. We are talking about self-reports: questionnaires about how young people feel. Such instruments do not measure whether someone has a disorder, but how someone experiences their own well-being. These instruments mainly measure how well you recognize signals of stress and anxious feelings in yourself and whether you sometimes feel down. The fact that these mental complaints are different from a psychiatric disorder is crucial and often overlooked.

The increase in self-reported complaints may therefore not indicate that young people are mentally stuck, but that they have found better words for their feelings. That is not an indication of weakness, but a sign of awareness. Young people are more likely to know what is going on and dare to name it. That’s a win.

Adequate respons

We may therefore be witnessing a cultural paradigm shift. Where previous generations hid their fears and gloom, young people now speak openly about them. And the increase in psychological disorders during the corona pandemic mainly concerned depression and anxiety: an adequate response to an exciting time?

The new openness may come across as an increase in mental illness, but it could also be an increase in expression. Young people do not sound the alarm out of panic, but out of awareness. They know that mental health is part of it, just like physical health. That is not a crisis; that is emancipation.

Of course there is still inequality, poverty and performance pressure, but the overall picture is more nuanced than the current crisis narrative suggests.

This emancipation is in line with data on the development of young people in a broader sense, which suggest progress rather than decline. The number of school dropouts has fallen in the Netherlands since 2010. Youth unemployment is decreasing. There has been a downward trend in juvenile crime for years. And serious childhood trauma – from domestic violence to sexual abuse – is also less common than twenty years ago, according to American and European figures.

These are not small improvements. They point out that, despite the many challenges, young people are growing up in a society that is safer, more inclusive and more promising than before. Of course, there is still inequality, poverty and performance pressure, but the overall picture is more nuanced than the current crisis narrative suggests.

Nevertheless, never before have so many young people received professional psychological help as now. In 2000 this was 1 in 27 children in the Netherlands, today it is . In England, young people now receive a form of youth care. If we are not careful, we will also go that way in the Netherlands. We cannot handle that: youth care costs have been high since 2015 and the staff shortage is dire.

Power button

Despite this large increase in psychological treatments, we have not seen a decrease in the number of children and young people who say they have psychological complaints. How is that possible?

One explanation is that more care also creates more awareness. The better we learn to talk about mental health, the more people recognize the complaints that are discussed. That in itself is not a problem, as long as we do not label every human sorrow as a disease. We must therefore get rid of the division between ‘sick’ and ‘healthy’. Mental health is not an on-off switch, it is a swing on which you balance. Everyone experiences periods of stress, loss or uncertainty. The question is not whether you will encounter problems, but how you will deal with them when they do.

Instead of focusing exclusively on disorders, we should better investigate what makes young people mentally resilient. What social, emotional, existential and societal factors keep them going? How do family, school, community and meaning contribute to their ability to recover? In this sense, young people today may not be sicker, but rather better connected – with their feelings, their friends and with a language to speak about inner experiences.

This does not mean that we can sit back. Mental complaints among young people exist, and the need is real for many. But the question is which need they express. Treatment with a therapist? Or recognition of the complaints they experience? Sometimes the words young people use can be confusing. It’s like teenagers who accuse each other of being ‘autistic’ when they finally tidy up their room. They have swiped the psychiatric labels into their daily lives via TikTok. In short: understanding what young people mean requires pausing and asking questions.

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