What is it about?
Millennials are driving the apparent deterioration in mental health in Australia, according to a large longitudinal household survey conducted since 2001. The survey asks about a wide range of household issues, including subjective wellbeing and mental health symptoms. The mental health scores of people born in the 1990s and 1980s are declining faster than any generation before them, and show no sign of recovering with age as older generations have done. What were previously thought to be temporary changes may represent persistent lifetime differences.
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Why is it important?
Mental health declines have been observed in multiple countries in the developed world in a 'megatrend', however it has been unclear whether this decline would spontaneously recover with age or reflected a permanent problem. This work identifies the decline with birth cohort rather than age for the first time, which suggests it may reflect a life-long persistent problem.
Perspectives
Publishing this work has made me realise that people around the world are seriously concerned with the wellbeing of our young people and what this means for the future. The work represents the value of well-conducted, long-term projects such as the HILDA survey from which the data was sourced (and which I had nothing to do with!). I hope it helps governments and policy-makers realise we need to be paying attention to more than just standard economic metrics such as GDP, unemployment or the Gini index to understand how we are faring as a society.
Richard Morris
University of Sydney
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Generational differences in mental health trends in the twenty-first century, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2303781120.
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