Each successive generation of Australians since the 1950s has had worse mental health than the generation before them, new research has found.
A study led by the University of Sydney has found that people born in the 1990s have worse mental health for their age than any previous generation, and do not experience better mental health as they age, as previous generations did.
The study, published Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tracked changes in the mental health of 27,572 Australians over 20 years from 2001 to 2020.
Using the nationally representative Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, the researchers assessed how the mental health of people born in each decade from the 1940s to the 1990s changed as they aged, and compared the mental health of each birth cohort at the same age.
Dr Richard Morris, lead author of the study and senior research fellow in the Faculty of Medicine and Health, said mental health was thought to be U-shaped over a person’s lifetime: good during school years, then declining towards middle age before recovering.
Previous research comparing generations might find that someone in their 50s was happier than someone in their 30s, but was unable to determine whether this was due to the difference in age or the difference in birth cohort, Morris said. “This is the first time we’ve really been able to locate it as a birth cohort difference.”
“The mental health of younger generations of people born in the 1990s – and to some extent in the 1980s – is worse than older generations, and they’re not showing the rebound that we typically see in these older generations.”
The researchers found that the decline in mental health from around 2010 was also experienced by those born in the 1980s and, to a lesser extent, the 1970s.
Although those born after 1999 were not included in the study, it notes that the trend of worsening mental health is “even more pronounced in recent adolescent cohorts”.
Prof Patrick McGorry, professor of adolescent mental health at the University of Melbourne, board member of the national adolescent mental health foundation Headspace and executive director of Orygen, said the study “provides really hard data to support the sense that we’re in a global adolescent mental health crisis”.
“Something has gone very, very seriously wrong with our society and the way we’re going and the way we’re looking after our next generations,” he said. “It’s not just the standard risk factors for mental illness that are at work here. It’s something new.”
McGorry said that megatrends – including the undermining of public education, the “rampant” transfer of wealth from young people to older people, climate change and social media – meant that “the bottom line is that young people’s lives and futures are much more precarious”.
Dr Peter Baldwin, a senior research fellow at the Black Dog Institute, attributed the much faster decline in mental health among those born in the 90s – compared to those born in the 80s – to the different types of technology that existed when the cohorts came of age.
While people born in the 80s experienced Web 1.0, with static information and websites, those born in the 90s grew up with social media and interactive technology – bringing with it a “flood” of social comparison that was really bad for mental health, Baldwin said.
“What young brains really want to know is, ‘Do I fit in?’ and ‘Am I good enough?’ And if you open up Instagram and you see 100 supermodels and athletes and entrepreneurs, that’s going to be a really hard yardstick to measure yourself against.”
Baldwin also believed there was a difference in how younger Australians, those born from the 90s onwards, were taught to deal with mental distress, with the rise of “safety-ism” – the idea that they needed to be psychologically safe at all times – becoming a barrier to building resilience. Baldwin said many were becoming more sensitive to social stress, disagreements with other people or being exposed to points of view with which they disagreed.
The influence of the prevalence inflation hypothesis – whether younger generations with greater language and literacy around their mental health make it easier to report – could be a direction for future research, Morris said.
McGorry said that while mental health problems could be prevented in the medium term by tackling the megatrends that contribute to them, there was an immediate need for greater investment in mental health services for young people, “otherwise many young people will die needlessly and many, many more will have their futures blighted by poorly treated mental illness”.
He stressed that it was also a “serious threat to Australia’s economic future” as older people relied on younger generations to support them.
