For years, the age profile of mental ill health was hump-shaped, peaking when people were in their late 40s or early 50s. But in recent years the mental health of the young has deteriorated to such an extent that, today, anxiety and despair peak when UK citizens are in their mid-20s. In most international surveys, adolescents in England, Scotland, and Wales are among the least happy in the world. This column focuses on one of the many likely contributory factors to young people’s mental health – the rise in social media, underpinned by the smartphone.
Until the Great Recession of 2008, wellbeing was U-shaped in age, reaching its nadir among those in their late 40s and early 50s. Mental ill health was a mirror-image, hump-shaped in age (Blanchflower 2020). But this has changed in countries like the UK. Today, wellbeing rises with age and mental ill health falls.
How did this happen? There has been a rise in depression and anxiety among the young in absolute terms, whilst the wellbeing and mental health of older people has remained relatively stable. This is apparent from Figure 1, which shows the change in the age profile of anxiety in the UK since 2009: the rise among the young is very evident.
Figure 1 Age profile in anxiety, UK
Source: Annual Population Survey, 2012-2021
We have subsequently identified similar age profiles in ill-being in more than 50 countries (Blanchflower et al. 2024a, 2024b, 2024c). But the change is particularly pronounced in the UK such that, by 2024, the mental health scores of 18-24 year-olds in the UK were the poorest of the 37 countries in the Global Minds Survey (Blanchflower et al. 2024c: Table 11).
Ongoing research is focusing on why this change is happening. Some argue that there are likely multiple potential reasons for the change. They range from better and faster diagnoses of mental health conditions; to the ‘scarring’ effect of the Great Recession of 2008; changes in the social norms regarding preparedness to report mental health conditions – especially after COVID; a decline in the perceived life chances of younger people compared to older generations, allied to increased pressure on young people to succeed in the light of poorer prospects for all; and parenting styles.
One possible explanation could be the disproportionate impact of COVID on young people’s mental health, something that some previous research has pointed to (Banks and Xu 2020). However, the rise in poor mental health among the young pre-dates the COVID pandemic by some years, though there is some evidence to suggest that COVID did exacerbate the trends (Blanchflower et al. 2024a). In the most recent study, which tracks despair among respondents to the UK’s Labour Force Survey, the trend is traced all the way back to the late 1990s, although there was a big up-tick in mental ill-health in the years shortly after the Great Recession of 2008 (Blanchflower et al. 2024c).
Another clue as to the origins of the trend is that the decline in mental health is apparent among children and young adolescents. The UK is not unusual in this regard. The same trend is apparent among children across the world, as captured in data on the wellbeing of 15- and 16-year-olds in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) (Marquez and Long 2021). However, the decline is particularly pronounced in England. Among the 15-year-old students in the OECD’s 2022 PISA survey, English students’ life satisfaction ranked fourth bottom, just above Turkey, Jamaica, and Brunei.
One proximate cause of the declining mental health of the young, suggested by many influential researchers, has been the rise in social media, underpinned by new technologies, most notably the smartphone.
Why might smartphone technology be a contributor to the decline in young people’s mental health? After all, one might imagine that access to the internet is of benefit to people in their lives, providing them with a range of opportunities (entertainment, information, banking services) that they might not otherwise have access to. Indeed, there is research confirming that access to the internet is positively correlated with people’s subjective wellbeing (Vuorre and Przybylski 2024).
Nevertheless, smartphone use may adversely impact young people’s wellbeing in a variety of ways, including impacts on brain function or inducing anxiety through information overload, cyber-bullying or social comparison with the world others appear to inhabit. A recent study for the UK confirms that prolonged daily use of digital devices (beyond four hours a day) does adversely impact adolescents’ mental health (McNamee et al. 2022), whilst experiments involving smartphone bans at school report improvements in pupil’s wellbeing, their behaviours towards one another, and even their ability to concentrate at school and pupil performance (Abrahamsson et al. 2024).
There are likely many contributory factors to young people’s mental health, but smartphone usage appears to be one of them. As a precautionary measure, and as social scientists collect more information on the causes of deteriorating mental ill health among the young, it appears sensible to consider ways to limit smartphone access and usage among school children in the UK and elsewhere.
Source : VOXeu
