# Mental health crisis ‘means youth is no longer one of happiest times of life’

**UN-commissioned study** in UK, US, Ireland, Australia, Canada and New Zealand finds satisfaction rises with age

**Richard Partington**  
Economics correspondent  
Mon 3 Mar 2025 04.05 EST  
Last modified on Mon 3 Mar 2025 10.40 EST

For more than half a century, the midlife crisis has been a feature of western society. Fast cars, impulsive decisions, and peak misery between the age of 40 and 50. But all that is changing, according to experts.

In a  commissioned by the UN, the leading academics  and  warn that a burgeoning youth mental health crisis in six English-speaking countries worldwide is upending the traditional pattern of happiness across our lifetimes.

> “The U-shape in wellbeing by age that used to exist in these countries is now gone, replaced by a crisis in wellbeing among the young,” according to the paper published by the US National Bureau of Economic Research.

Analysing responses to surveys in the US, UK, , Australia, Canada and New Zealand, the study found that life satisfaction and happiness had fallen among young people over the past decade, and particularly among young women.

It highlighted the rise of smartphones and social media, suggesting the trend coincided with the growth of internet usage, with the impact on happiness visible in surveys across the six countries and in several other nations worldwide.

> “This may end up being a lost generation,” Blanchflower, a former Bank of England policymaker, told the Guardian in an interview. He said there had been a sharp drop in wellbeing in the US and the UK in particular, and pointed to the growth of social media, cyberbullying and body shaming online.

“I don’t think there is any doubt you have an absolute global crisis.  are in deep disarray and trouble. And the question is what do we do about it? And we don’t know.”

A leading British labour market economist now at the prestigious US Dartmouth College, Blanchflower had written a paper in 2020 looking across almost 150 advanced and developing countries and found the same U shape in happiness applied everywhere. However, he now says he missed the collapse in youth wellbeing from about 2013 in survey data, before starting to work with Twenge, who is a leading expert on the subject.

“I looked and I thought, ‘Oh shit, she’s right.’ What had happened is a really big deal. It wasn’t Covid, it had started before that, but that extended it after 2020.”

Other studies have drawn links between the youth mental health crisis and , unregulated social media, insecure employment and the climate crisis. Young people are also increasingly like to be outside the jobs market with mental health conditions.

Blanchflower said the collapse in youth wellbeing could have vast social and economic consequences. “The economics of this are a really big deal. Potentially this relates to the kids withdrawing from school; then they go out of the labour force. Presumably it will affect your performance at school, it might well impact global productivity,” he added.

He said the UN had commissioned further research to identify whether the phenomenon could be found elsewhere around the world. “The UN sees this as a huge global crisis,” he added.

“We always thought that as life becomes more realistic, happiness declines because of pressures, then you realise life isn’t so bad. We’re having to rethink that entire thought.”
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