Struggling or Snowflakes? The Gen Z Mental Health Story
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Welcome back to the Gen Z story. It's me, Vicki Spratt. This week, we're looking at young people's mental health. This is one of the most important aspects of this series, but it was also the most difficult to cover. One in five young people in the UK is currently suffering from a mental health problem. This issue clearly matters to you. Hundreds of Tripp listeners wrote in to tell us about their thoughts on the issue. This episode is a little bit different to what you've heard before because we've actually got three guests. They've all got a slightly different take on the Gen Z mental health story. We've got the Oxford psychologist who specializes in adolescent mental health. We've got the young woman who has written a book about her experiences of growing up online.
And we've got the young man, a researcher who's been traveling the UK and speaking to thousands of young people about their experiences. We're going to be asking some difficult questions in this episode. Is there an over-diagnosis problem with young people? Has therapy culture gone too far? Or have today's young adults been let down by the housing crisis, relatively low wages, and expensive university education?
What are the current mental health challenges facing Gen Z?
So are they struggling or are they snowflakes? That's what we'll explore in this episode of the Gen Z Mental Health Story. We'll start by talking to Dr. Lucy Foulkes. She's an Oxford University psychologist who specializes in adolescent mental health. I asked her why she thinks young people's mental health diagnoses have skyrocketed over the last 20 years.
There's a lot of explanations for what's happening and lots of things are changing in parallel. So more people are reporting that they have symptoms in surveys. More people are seeking help for these problems and more people are getting diagnosed. And it's not straightforward why that is happening. It's a total cultural transformation in talking about these problems. So that's one component of it. But then also there's the component that things are and these explanations aren't competing, that things really are worse and that there are factors for young people that are different now relative to generations in the past.
There's more information about mental health online than ever before, but might that also have led to more people self-diagnosing with mental health problems?
People have been interested in mental health and even, you know, reporting that mental health problems are increasing for, you know, 100 years. But certainly in the last 20, 30 years, there has been this explosion in interest in mental health and in framing our difficulties and our challenges in the language of mental health and the language of psychiatry that has become very normalized today. And it wasn't happening in the 90s. Really, if you were going to use the language of psychiatry, really, that was for people who were very unwell. And you really didn't want to talk about it openly. That has completely shifted now. Generally, if people are unhappy, they're more likely to talk about being depressed if they use terms like OCD and PTSD very casually.
And actually, it seems like these... psychiatric disorders now have a kind of parallel use. So there is a lot of understanding about what these disorders really are because people have educated themselves via the internet. So people are now accurately saying that they have OCD, for example, but also they are casually using this language almost as kind of a joke or just as a kind of catch-all term for being tidy or obsessive, for example. And we interviewed young people. They're not naive to this. They know that there is these kind of two parallel usages happen. But really in the past, and it's happening in relationships as well. So in the past, we might have just not being compatible with someone, but now we tend to say that they're avoidant or that they're a narcissist.
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