Psychische Störungen bei jungen Erwachsenen haben stark zugenommen, wobei neue Untersuchungen zeigen, dass der Anteil junger Australier, die die Diagnosekriterien für Angst-, Stimmungs- oder Substanzstörungen erfüllen, von 2007 bis 2022 von 23,4 Prozent auf 36,2 Prozent gestiegen ist.
https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2026/07/24/mental-disorders-surge-among-young-adults-research.html
13 Kommentare
Im so happy I finally found an antidepressant that works for me
Feels like a miracle to finally be able to feel positive emotions again
Mental disorders among young adults have surged, with new research showing the proportion of young Australians meeting diagnostic criteria for anxiety, mood or substance disorders has increased from 23.4 percent to 36.2 percent from 2007 to 2022.
Severe mental disorders rose even more sharply – increasing from 14.7 percent to 24 percent, with suicidal thoughts more than doubling for Australians aged 16 to 24.
It is the first study of its kind to perform national comparisons using diagnostic interviews to examine changes in rates of individual disorders among Australian youth over time, mapping estimates of prevalence, patterns and severity.
The Lancet Regional Health Western Pacific study, led by the Matilda Centre for Mental Health and Substance Use at the University of Sydney, examined national survey data of people aged 16 to 24 over the period between 2007–2022.
Key findings:
Mental disorder prevalence increased from 23.4 percent in 2007 to 36.2 percent in 22, with those classed as ‘severe’ rising from 14.7 percent to 24 percent.
Anxiety disorders, including agoraphobia (with or without panic disorder), social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) more than doubled from 12.2 percent to 29.1 percent.
Mood disorders, including major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder and dysthymia – also known as persistent depressive disorder – also more than doubled from 4.9 percent to 13.3 percent.
Comorbidity, severity, suicidal thoughts, psychological distress, and disability also rose, with one in five young Australians experiencing multiple disorders in 2022.
Mental disorders continue to be more common in females, but increases were also observed in males, following a similar upward trajectory over the same period.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6065(26)00129-X/fulltext
I wonder how many previous generations self treated with alcohol and cigarettes rather than seeking help
Interesting how the article says that alcohol use has decreased. It’s interesting how substance use disorder seem to have decreased (alcohol use has decreased a lot, which probably counts towards that)
So they say it’s not likely to be about diagnosis changes and more about actual changes.
‘We identified economic insecurity, precarious work and housing, the lingering impacts of the COVID pandemic on education and productivity, and the double-edged influence of digital media as factors that may contribute to poorer mental health among young people,’
Doesn’t sound too unlikely to me. The prospect of AI probably isn’t helping, or climate change. I guess you could call that the indirect effects of digital media, as you get bombarded with it on a much more frequent basis than you might’ve beforehand. I grew up thinking that nuclear war could happen as a reasonable possibility but it just wasn’t part of day-to-day life – now you’d probably see 10 posts about it a day or more.
I always wonder how much of this is just down to more young adults surviving than in many previous generations.
The generations that served in WWI and WWII had an awful lot of combat deaths, and while the survivors presumably had high rates of PTSD, we do know many world war veterans went on to recover and have pretty successful lives. Despite the survivor’s guilt, feeling grateful to be alive does seem like it helped them long-term.
The generation after that had Vietnam and also still had high rates of diseases that are now preventable, such as polio.
Gen-X was a small generation to begin with, and they had the AIDS crisis.
People returning from WWII or dying of AIDS were not being screened for generalized anxiety disorder, they were being triaged and mostly treated for their physical ailments.
Also, historically people who struggle to cope with daily life have tended to make high-risk choices like „join up and go to war“ and „have unprotected sex during the AIDS pandemic,“ so there may be a self-selection factor in who did and did not survive.
Maybe the modern world is keeping young adults with unhappy lives alive when previously many of them would have died, but it’s not actually providing them with what they need to achieve mental well-being?
What do I have to be anxious about? Just because data centers are popping up everywhere and environmental disasters that cause rare and chronic diseases surge within miles of them? Or the fact that my president at best is a nut job or worse the most corrupt president ever to live. The fact that the economy is so bad that my best job in the area hasn’t given me a substantial pay raise in the last 6 years? The environmental issues, global issues, and the cherry ontop of just aging and realising that the support structures that helped previous generations is disintegrating due to corrupt politicians… no other reasons to be anxious…
I wonder what it says about the environments young people are being exposed to
This is subjective, but I’m a firm believer that diet is a massive part of rising anxiety issues. I was all over the place mentally until I started taking magnesium and a small multivitamin- just like that, mental balance and better sleep. It’s like I never even had an issue, and all of the various social stressors that used to keep me awake stopped at the same time in a day or two.
It’s important to remember lockdown in Australia, especially Melbourne, was brutal.
„Melbourne, Australia holds the record for the longest cumulative COVID-19 lockdown of any city in the world, totaling 262 days across six separate periods between March 2020 and October 2021.“
I think that is a likely catalyst for some of this. A lot of kids were very badly affected by the lockdown.
I always hate articles like this because really the answer is “people know more now” and are willing to admit they have problems. I know plenty of Boomers with problems they never talked to anyone about and certainly haven’t come to grips with themselves.
It’s the economy and the system destroying the bottom and making climbing up and out near impossible unless you have some sort of leg up.
The world we’ve built around us is not very condusive to good mental health. We are hyper social creatures and online interaction is not equal substitute.