Why Young People are Being Dubbed “Generation Sicknote”
Youth of Today: Generation Sicknote
We talk a lot these days about Generation X, Generation Z, and Millennials but most of us haven’t got a clue what that means other than “people a lot younger than us.” But now we have a new name for the youth of today: Generation Sicknote.
Mental Health Crisis Among Young People
A new report from the Resolution Foundation think tank has revealed that young people are increasingly blaming mental health problems for being jobless. And they are doing it on a staggering scale. A whopping one in three young people says they have experienced symptoms of mental illness — such as depression, anxiety, or bipolar disorder — in 2022, and that’s up from one in four in 2000. Youngsters are more likely to experience a mental disorder than any other age group.
Economic Inactivity Due to Mental Health
The number of 18 to 24-year-olds who are now “economically inactive” due to health problems has more than DOUBLED in the past decade, rising from 93,000 to 190,000. Two-thirds report suffering from poor mental health and four in ten claim that is the main reason why they don’t have a job. That isn’t just a wave of misery for them — it’s a tsunami of pain for our economy too, with a huge number of working-age people not actually working and paying tax. What on earth are we to make of these astonishing figures?
The Impact of Mental Health Stigma
Some will blame the Covid lockdowns, which undoubtedly hit young people far harder than adults. Others may claim it’s all the fault of Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter, as youngsters compete online to pretend their bodies and lifestyles are impossibly perfect. If either of those are to blame, then our British youth have been uniquely cursed because no other country appears to be suffering from the same level of job-defying mental anguish. So what can be driving the younger generation away from work and back under the duvet?
Attitude Towards Mental Health
I think the answer lies in our attitude to mental health. We used to not talk about mental health enough. Now we talk about it too much. We have moved from brushing mental health under the carpet to putting it at the centre of everything — in big neon letters. We have created this mental health crisis by medicalizing everyday life. We now treat perfectly normal feelings as if they are dangerous signs of mental ill health, whether it be depression, anxiety, or anything else. (This is also very damaging to people who genuinely DO struggle with mental health problems because it makes it harder for them to get the help they need.)
Cruel to Be Kind
There’s nothing wrong or abnormal about feeling upset about a relationship break-up or anxious about exams or a job interview. Or, frankly, just having a bad day sometimes. These are appropriate reactions to the medical condition we call “life” but now they’re treated as a problem — not just part and parcel of our human existence. While older generations like mine were expected to simply get on with it, today’s parents often rush to mollycoddle their children — even into adulthood — while teachers send them home from school and doctors hand out anti-depressants like sweets. Is it any wonder, then, that young people arrive in the workplace and can’t cope when the boss expects them to knuckle down and simply get on with the job? Sometimes, as any parent knows, you have to be cruel to be kind. Instead of abandoning these youngsters to a life of pyjama-clad poverty and unhappiness, we need to get them back to work. We’re not doing young people a favor by turning them into Generation Sicknote.