At The New York Times, Christina Caron reports on new research showing how climate change, economic stressors, technology, and other international issues are affecting youth—and calling for change in how mental health is defined and addressed:
“The mental health of adolescents and young adults has been on the decline and it’s partly because of ‘harmful megatrends’ like financial inequality, according to a new report published on Tuesday in the scientific journal The Lancet Psychiatry. The global trends affecting younger generations also include wage theft, unregulated social media, job insecurity and climate change, all of which are creating ‘a bleak present and future for young people in many countries,’ according to the authors. . . .
The authors argue that mental health is not merely an individual issue to be tackled after someone becomes unwell; it is also necessary to focus collectively on the environmental, social, economic, political and technological changes that contribute to mental distress.
While the ‘megatrends’ identified in the report have been around for decades, the authors argue that they have worsened.
‘We need to rapidly invest in early intervention’ as well as new treatments and new ways of caring for people, said Dr. Patrick McGorry, the lead author of the report and a psychiatrist in Australia. ‘If young people end up dying, on welfare or even just underachieving in large numbers, then social cohesion and productivity are seriously affected. That is happening now.’
Financial and environmental worries weigh heavily on young people.
While research and public discourse tends to focus on the potential negative effects of social media and screen time, the report’s authors emphasized that economic and environmental factors can also play a large role in the decline of youth mental health.
According to the Lancet commission, economic trends of the last two decades have contributed to problems like rising student debt, disparities in wealth between the older and younger generations and the difficulty in both finding and keeping a job.”
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