For decades, people have hit an "unhappiness hump” during midlife between the more content periods of old age and youth - but perhaps no longer.
A survey of more than ten million Americans and 40,000 British households has revealed the widely documented rise in worry, stress, and depression with age - that peaks in midlife and then declines - may have disappeared.
The average 22-year-old is likely to be unhappier than their parents, according to a study published in the journal PLOS One by researchers from UK and US universities.
The shift, according to Professor David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College in the US, is not due to middle-aged people suddenly becoming more cheerful. Instead, Gen Z is far more prone to despair and anxiety than previous generations in their early twenties.
“We started out seeing this in the US, where we initially found that despair - where people say that every day of their life is a bad mental health day - has exploded for the young, especially among young women,” Professor Blanchflower told The Times.
“We then found the same in the UK. And we have now seen that all around the world.”
Since 2008, a U-shaped trend in which wellbeing tends to decline from childhood until around age 50 before rebounding in old age, has been observed in developed and developing countries worldwide with a corresponding “unhappiness hump” in midlife.
But after the survey and further analysis on data from nearly two million people from 44 countries in a mental health study called Global Minds, researchers found the unhappiness hump has disappeared worldwide.
Instead, it has been replaced by a gradually descending line as unhappiness decreases with age.
Reasons for the disappearance of unhappiness in midlife are unclear, but it is thought that long-term impacts of the Great Recession on job prospects for younger people, underfunded mental health care services, mental health challenges posed by the Covid pandemic, and increased social media use could be to blame.
The authors added: “Ours is the first paper to show that the decline in young people's mental health in recent years means that today, both in the United States and the United Kingdom, mental ill-being is highest among the young and declines with age.
“This is a huge change from the past when mental ill-being peaked in middle age. The reasons for the change are disputed, but our concern is that today there is a serious mental health crisis among the young that needs addressing.”
However, the study authors noted further research is needed to determine whether any of these factors are the cause of young people's unhappiness.
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