Being young is usually a positive factor when talking about health. But things change radically when we focus on mental health. A new analysis based on data from the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) reveals that mental disorders burden the lives of the population aged five to 24 years . One in 10 children and young people of this age (or in other words, 293 million worldwide) lives with at least one diagnosable mental disorder, according to a study published today in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.
“The mental health of young people around the world is in crisis,” explains David C. Saunders, a child psychiatrist at Columbia University, United States, in an editorial associated with the research. The figures reported in the study are in line with the data available on the global prevalence of mental disorders in young people, which stands at 13.4% in children and adolescents up to the age of 18. However, this study disaggregates by age and sex groups, showing large differences depending on the disease. In these matters, age matters. Thus, anxiety predominates in the 5 to 9 year old group, while depressive disorders are more prevalent in the 15 to 19 year old and 20 to 24 year old groups. Sex is also determining. Thus, men are more likely to suffer from alcoholism or drug abuse problems, while anxiety, depression or eating disorders are more prevalent among women. In other diseases where the social conditioning is not so clear, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, there are hardly any differences.
The GBD is a study that evaluates mortality and disability caused by major diseases, injuries and risk factors. It involves a collaboration of more than 3,600 researchers from 145 countries. And it takes a still and generic photo of the diseases that affect the world. This analysis has done zoom in a specific population group, young people, and in a specific type of illness, mental illnesses.
The results are alarming, but not surprising. The scientific magazine PNAS published a study last November that warned of worsening mental health among younger population groups in Australia. Depressive symptoms are also more common among British teenagers born in the 2000s than among those born in the previous decade.
“It also agrees with what we see here,” confirms José Luis Ayuso Mateos, professor of psychiatry at the Autonomous University of Madrid. “Clinical reality has long demonstrated that we were facing a problem that had to be addressed.” Ayuso, who also works on field studies for the World Health Organization, has had nothing to do with this analysis. But he is working on the 2021 GBD and can say one thing: “The pandemic has had a clear impact. When it comes out, we will see that there is a considerable increase among depressives, anxiety disorders, the number of suicides and the number of completed suicides. The dimension of the problem is going to seem more marked.”
When talking about mental health, it is normal to place a turning point in the pandemic, with millions of people locked in their homes, with difficult access to a doctor and a lot of time to think. But the truth, the analyzes show, is that the change was already brewing before. “Young people’s mental health is getting worse,” Saunders notes in his editorial. “But there are important things that this trial cannot answer, and one of them is why.” However, the psychiatrist speculates on the possible causes, “stressors such as social networks and climate change (eco-anxiety) may be impacting depression rates,” he points out.
Another commonplace when talking about the mental health of young people is to focus on the fragility of the so-called, disparagingly, crystal generation. Once again, the data clarifies this idea. “One could speculate that the increases seen in recent years are a misperception: that greater awareness and less stigma could have led to more diagnoses,” Saunders acknowledges. But he then highlights the increase in suicide attempts among young people as a counterargument. ”This suggests that the increase in diagnoses of mental illness in youth is not an artificial phenomenon,” she concludes.
It’s not new either. Since the first GBD results in the 1990s, evidence has accumulated that mental disorders begin to manifest in adolescence, reaching a peak around age 14. This period, which spans from childhood to the beginning of young adulthood, “is crucial due to the intense developmental changes that occur,” the study notes, “such as brain maturation, school entry, puberty and transition to work. Perhaps for this reason, the study considers that it would be advisable to increase the period of study as an adolescent until age 24, when the transition to adult life is truly completed.
“It is not new data, in fact, it is a historical observation in epidemiology,” confirms Ayuso. “Younger cohorts have more mental illness morbidity than cohorts of people born earlier. It was already seen, for example, that people who were born after World War II in the United States had a higher prevalence of depression than those people who were born before World War II.” Since then, various epidemiological studies have confirmed this idea. Like the present.
The study not only leaves certainties. It also recognizes the need for additional research to better understand the underlying causes of the current crisis and the identification of more vulnerable populations. It is highlighted that factors such as exposure to social networks, virtual reality and artificial intelligence should also be considered in future research. And it warns of the possible consequences of a factor that this analysis has not yet been able to analyze: the pandemic.