You’re Missing the Good News About Youth Mental Health

By Anya Kamenetz

Let’s play a word-association game. If I say “youth mental health,” what’s the next word that comes to mind? It’s probably “crisis.”

For over a decade, researchers, policymakers, teachers, parents, and the media have been raising the alarm about the rising prevalence of anxiety, depression, and emotional distress among young people. Technology use and the COVID-19 pandemic have both been identified as major vectors exacerbating the crisis globally. But more recently, things have been looking up in many ways. 

More Youth Are Flourishing
“There seems to be this reflex to talk about the crisis and play up the numbers,” says Daniel Eisenberg at UCLA. He is a principal investigator of the Healthy Minds Network (HMN) for Research on Adolescent and Young Adult Mental Health. The network administers a national survey study of college student mental health and related factors.

Their most recent data show a two-year uptick in college students who are flourishing, for the first time since 2012. And that’s not the only bright spot. Eisenberg says: Recent data from a variety of sources, not just ours, suggest that young adults and adolescents are reporting a little bit less distress compared to previous years. There’s less loneliness. Suicidal ideation and severe anxiety seem to be declining. Everything is moving together as you might expect.

Some of the improvements may be from the increase in attention, funding, and resources in response to the crisis. Eisenberg says that there is an uptick in young people using apps and telehealth to support their well-being. In a study published in the National Library of Medicine, peer-reviewed data from users of the Roadmap mHealth App, a mental health app, showed significant decreases in depression, anxiety, and loneliness and an increase in “flourishing” between 2020 and 2022.

Highlighting Resilience
There’s also many positive recent survey results that highlight the general resilience of young people. Research published by Surgo Health’s Youth Mental Health Tracker, with responses from 4,500 youth, had four in five reporting being satisfied with life, happy, and feeling that what they do in life is meaningful.

In a national survey by Hopelab, 55 percent rated their mental health as “good,” “very good,” or “excellent,” and 57 percent expressed optimism about their own futures, even though they had significant worries about the future of the country and the world. Hearteningly, 70 percent said they have “people in my life who really care about me.” And in July 2024, a whopping 94 persent of 10- to 18-year-olds told Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation that they felt happiness “a lot” of the prior day.

Distress Still Too High
Every researcher interviewed for this article emphasized that levels of distress among young people are still too high. They are disproportionately high for girls, for LGBTQ+ youth, for Black and Hispanic youth, and for those who struggle economically. The question is how to build on what’s going right, and use still-limited resources to create solutions that work for all young people.

Eisenberg is part of an informal group of researchers who are working on “challenging the crisis narrative” in youth mental health. “One of the points is to push back against the idea that we need to get as many people as possible into mental health care.” He advocates starting instead with a public health approach that focuses on prevention, including healthy habits, and offering many tiers of support across a population.

Stephanie Malia Krauss concurs. She’s an educational consultant, social worker, and author of three books on youth well-being, including the forthcoming How We Thrive. “We’re in a little bit of a Chicken Little moment,” Krauss says. “The crisis can be confusing, and mental health gets linked with mental illness so strongly.” “As a rule, young people have such intense inner wisdom,” she adds. “Their behavior will talk for them, and they are telling us what they need.”

Emma Bruehlman-Senecal, principal researcher at Hopelab, came to a similar conclusion by asking young people themselves. “They told us what we were missing,” she says. “There needs to be more nuance to the conversation of what’s helping as well as hurting young people’s well-being.” So, in addition to collecting information about stressors, the poll asked young people to name the factors in their life that they think are most supportive of their mental health. The top three? Solo downtime, face-to-face friend time, and getting enough sleep.

By centering young people and their agency in their research design, Bruehlman-Senecal and her colleagues hoped to counteract the “crisis narrative” of a “lonely, lost generation,” with one that focuses on strength and the capacity for growth. While they are realistic about challenges facing themselves and the world, Bruehlman-Senecal says, “A top source of young people’s hope for the future was faith in their own resilience. Which flies in the face of young people being these fragile snowflakes that crumble at the slightest pressure.”

This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Click here to read the original article.