From the start, it was clear that the coronavirus pandemic would be cruel to Britain’s young people. How cruel has only become clear over time.
Children, teenagers and adults in their early 20s were the least likely to suffer adverse physical effects, but suffered most from the restrictions put in place to prevent the spread of the virus. Children were deprived of education. Teens were stuck in their homes and unable to see their friends in person.
The concentration of young adults working in the hospitality industry made them the most vulnerable to being fired or losing their jobs. It was a recipe for an increase in unhappiness and mental illness – and so it has proven to be. People in their early twenties do more likely to be out of work due to ill health than those in their early forties.
All this would be bad enough if young people had entered the pandemic in good shape. But as a new academic article shows that the mental health of young people has been deteriorating for a decade and a half. This is not just a British phenomenon. The same appears to be happening in more than thirty other countries.
It used to be thought that there was a U-shaped trend in well-being, with happiness declining as young people reached middle age and then rising again as they got older. David Blanchflower, former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, and his two co-authors on the paper, Alex Bryson and Xiaowei Xu, show that this is no longer the case. Their evidence suggests that the younger you are, the unhappier you are. In Britain and the US, the trend is particularly pronounced among young white women.
The research examines whether people feel anxious or desperate. The latter is measured by asking respondents how many days out of the past thirty days their mental health has not been good. If someone says that every day is a bad day for mental health, they are classified as suffering from despair.
Around 8% of all UK respondents were in despair in 2009-10, rising to 12% in 2020-21. Among men under 25, despair has doubled since 2009 from 5% to 11%. The percentage of young women in despair has increased even more, from 8% in 2011 to 20% in 2020. It has also doubled (from 9% to 18%). ) among women aged 25 to 44. The increase was much less pronounced in older women.
The deterioration in young people’s mental wellbeing can be traced back to the scars of the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). This was a time when banks nearly failed, the supply of credit dried up, economies shrank and unemployment rose sharply. The article argues that the employment prospects of new entrants to the labor market may have suffered irreparable damage during the financial crisis.
The period that followed was one of wage stagnation. According to the Resolution Foundation think tank, the average British worker is around 40% – or almost £14,000 a year – worse off than if profits had continued to grow in line with pre-financial crisis trends.
Young people’s incomes have been particularly hard hit, so much so that the current generation will likely be the first in a century to do so poorer than their parents, and have a level of homeownership comparable to that of their grandparents. There are clearly economic reasons behind rising unhappiness among young people, although these do not explain why reported levels of well-being have fallen among 10- to 16-year-olds who still have to work.
More recently, three other factors may have played a role, the paper’s authors say. The first is the underfunding of mental health care in the US and Britain, where delays in access to care can cause prolonged periods of ill health.
The second is the increasing use of smartphones, which became more widely available at about the same time that the upward trend in cases of desperation began to manifest.
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“There is increasing evidence to suggest that the increase in illness among young people is linked to the increasing use of the internet and smartphones. The timing matches almost exactly: Internet use and declining mental health among young people, and especially young women, both began to rise from around 2011,” the paper says.
Finally, there is the impact of Covid, which, while it cannot explain the deterioration in mental health among young people during the financial crisis and its aftermath, may have accelerated the trend. Placing young people under house arrest was always asking for trouble.
Government ministers are concerned about the negative impact that inaction is having on the economy, and will have even more cause for concern at the latest figures on the labor market are released on Tuesday. It will show that the number of people leaving the labor market due to ill health has risen by a third compared to pre-pandemic levels.
Rishi Sunak recently announced a crackdown on sickness and disability benefits to end a “sick note culture” and “the over-medicalisation of life’s everyday challenges and concerns”. The Prime Minister is in danger of downplaying the deep-seated nature of a problem that can only be solved by tackling the causes of the accident and increasing the mental health budget.
It could mean age restrictions on social media access for children. It certainly means that when another pandemic breaks out, the full long-term costs across all age groups of lockdown restrictions will be taken into account. This was not the case in 2020, with disastrous consequences.