Paul Hopkins: Are we looking at a lost generation?

New HSE figures disclose that some 1,320 people with a mental health crisis were turned away from the Cross Lanes Psychiatric facility in Drogheda last year. And, although not disclosed, you can be sure that among that 1,320 there are many young adults.

Meath Councillor Alan Lawes has warned there is a life-threatening crisis in psychiatric services for Meath and Louth, and he told this paper that he was aware of at least one person who had taken their own life, having been turned away. He also pointed out that there are no in-patient psychiatric beds in Meath, with the Drogheda facility catering for both Meath and Louth.

Meanwhile, Special Education Minister Michael Moynihan has assured parents that appropriate special education school places will be made available to students in need before the beginning of the next school year. His promise comes after parents of children with additional needs recently staged a 24-hour ‘sleep out’ outside of the Department of Education, requesting immediate action the lack of suitable and available school spaces. Hundreds of children with additional needs nationwide have been left without a school place next year due to a growing shortage.

To top all this, comes news from a paper commissioned by the UN and warning that a burgeoning youth mental health crisis in six English-speaking countries worldwide – including Ireland – is upending the traditional pattern of happiness across our lifetimes.

Analysing responses to surveys in Ireland, the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, the study found that life satisfaction and happiness had fallen among young people in the past decade, and particularly among young women. The surveys highlighted the rise of smartphones and social media, the growth of internet usage, and the Covid pandemic with their impact on happiness visible in surveys across the six countries and in several other nations worldwide.

“This may end up being a lost generation,” says David Blanchflower, one of the key people behind the UN report. He says there has been a sharp drop in wellbeing of our young, and points to the growth of social media, cyberbullying and body shaming online.

“The young have become isolated. It’s also not so much that people are sitting there on the phone, it’s what they’re not doing. They’re not going out as much; playing with their friends, interacting with others, or having as much intimacy," he says.

A leading British labour market economist now at the prestigious US Dartmouth College, Blanchflower had written a paper in 2020 looking at almost 150 advanced and developing countries and found the same downturn in happiness applied everywhere. However, he now says he missed the collapse in youth wellbeing from about 2013 in survey data, before starting to work with female colleague Jean Twenge, a leading expert on the subject.

Other studies have drawn links between the youth mental health crisis and unregulated social media, insecure employment and the climate crisis. Young people with mental health issues are also increasingly likely to be outside the jobs market.

Blanchflower says the collapse in youth wellbeing could have vast social and economic consequences. “The economics of this are a really big deal. Potentially this relates to the kids withdrawing from school; then they go out of the labour force. Presumably it will affect your performance at school, it might well impact global productivity.”

He says the UN has commissioned further research to identify if the phenomenon could be found elsewhere around the world. “The UN sees this as a huge global crisis,” he concludes.

Our young here are quite capable of knuckling down to whatever the task at hand, whether it be college assignments or rising early to help with the cows. They are, in the main, a good, enthusiastic lot, a well-educated generation — I reared three of them — but there is so much more pressure on young shoulders today.

Despite their apparent nonchalance, there is an onus on them — some of it self-imposed or peer pressure — to perform, to achieve, to succeed. Against that, lack of adequate accommodation and parity of pay is leading, sadly, to another 'brain drain'.

I don’t have any magical solution to offer a generation under pressure until, if they’re lucky, they realise they are, after all, not as invincible as imagined but human, with all the downsides that that brings. There is no blueprint for being young and trying to grow up.

And, along the way, some young hearts become disillusioned... and broken.