I want to sit with it for a moment, because I think we owe it more than that.
They did not choose this. They inherited a world that was already burning, economically, politically, ecologically, and they were handed a phone at 9 years old to cope with it. We gave them screens when we did not know what else to give them. We handed them constant connectivity when what they needed was stillness. And then, when they could not sit still, when they burned out at 23, when they looked at the careers we had built and said quietly that they did not want them, we called it laziness.
They are not lazy. They are exhausted from surviving a world that was never designed for them.
The American Psychological Association's annual Stress in America survey has, for several consecutive years, found Gen Z to be the most stressed generation of any age group currently alive. They report higher rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness than any previous generation at the same age. In the United Kingdom, NHS data from 2023 found that 1 in 5 children aged 8 to 16 now has a probable mental health condition, up from 1 in 10 in 2004. Globally, the World Health Organisation estimates that half of all lifetime mental health conditions begin by age 14, and that most go undetected and untreated for years. The treatment gap, the distance between how many people need support and how many receive it, remains one of the largest in all of medicine.
These are not abstract statistics. They are the children in our schools, the young people entering the workforce, the 22-year-olds who are already in burnout before they have held a single full-time job. And they are the siblings, the children, the nieces and nephews of people who are reading this right now and wondering whether what they are seeing in their own families is normal.
It is not normal. It has simply become common. Those two things are not the same.
Gen Z, broadly defined as those born between 1997 and 2012, grew up inside several simultaneous disruptions that previous generations experienced, if at all, one at a time.
They came of age during the 2008 financial crisis, which reshaped their parents' economic realities and their own understanding of what security looks like. They watched climate anxiety become not an abstract future concern but a present one, with wildfires and floods and record temperatures arriving before they had finished secondary school. They were handed smartphones and social media accounts in early adolescence, before the research on the effects of those tools on developing brains had been conducted, let alone published.
And then, in 2020, the pandemic arrived. It took away the in-person experiences that form identity in adolescence: the friendships, the parties, the small rebellions, the physical presence of other people that teaches young humans how to be in the world. It moved everything online, into the same screens that were already overwhelming them, and it left many of them alone with their anxiety in ways that had no precedent.
What emerged on the other side was a generation that had been asked to grow up very fast, in very difficult circumstances, with very little institutional support. And what we offered them, largely, was the advice to be more resilient.
Resilience has become one of the most overused words in conversations about young people's mental health, and I think it is worth being honest about why.
Telling someone to be more resilient is, in most cases, a way of placing the responsibility for an impossible situation entirely on the individual experiencing it. It assumes that the problem is a deficit of personal strength rather than a structural failure of the environment they are navigating. It lets everyone else, the institutions, the policymakers, the adults who designed the systems, off the hook.
Gen Z has been told to be resilient about student debt that was not their doing. About a housing market they cannot enter. About a climate crisis they did not create. About a social media environment that was deliberately engineered to be addictive and that they were placed inside as children, without consent and without warning.
Resilience is a genuine and important quality. The problem is that we have been using it as a substitute for change rather than a complement to it. And young people know the difference.
If you are a parent, or a grandparent, or an aunt or uncle, or anyone who loves a young person and is watching them struggle, there is something I want you to understand. The difficulty they are experiencing is real. It is not a character flaw, not your fault, and not something that will resolve itself simply by waiting.
The most important thing any family can offer a struggling young person is neither advice nor a solution. It is the experience of being genuinely heard. Of having someone sit with them in what they are feeling without immediately trying to fix it, reframe it, or minimise it.
That sounds simple. In practice, it is one of the hardest things to do, because most of us were never taught how. We were taught to problem-solve, to keep moving, to find the silver lining. Those instincts, however well-intentioned, often communicate to a struggling person that their feelings are a problem to be managed rather than an experience to be witnessed.
Listening without fixing. Being present without performing optimism. Asking what they need rather than assuming you know. These are not small things. For a generation that feels fundamentally unseen by most of the institutions that were supposed to serve them, being genuinely seen by the people closest to them can be the thing that makes the difference.
There is a particular silence that surrounds mental health in families, even now, even as the conversation has opened up considerably in public life. It is the silence of not knowing what to say. Of being afraid to ask directly in case you make things worse. Of assuming that if something were seriously wrong, you would already know.
You might not know. Young people are often extraordinarily skilled at appearing fine. They have learned, in many cases, that their emotional reality is inconvenient or frightening to the adults around them, and they have become very good at managing the presentation. The child who seems to be coping is sometimes the child who has simply given up trying to communicate that they are not.
The question worth asking, directly and without making it a crisis, is simply: how are you actually doing? And then waiting. And then listening to what comes, without rushing to reassure or redirect.
That question, asked regularly and genuinely, does more than most of us realise.
Individual resilience and better family conversations are necessary. They are also not sufficient.
The mental health crisis affecting Gen Z is structural, and structural problems require structural responses. That means investment in school-based mental health support at a scale that matches the actual need rather than the available budget. Finland offers one example worth studying: the country has built school psychologists, counsellors and welfare professionals directly into its educational infrastructure as a legal requirement, present in schools before a crisis emerges rather than after. The approach is imperfect, and gaps remain. But the structural intention, that mental health support belongs inside schools as a matter of course, points toward what is possible.
It means regulation of social media platforms that takes seriously what the research, and now the courts, have been saying about their effects on young people. It means a genuine reckoning with the economic conditions that have left an entire generation unable to access the kind of stability that most of their parents took for granted.
None of that is simple, and none of it will happen quickly. But the conversation has to start somewhere, and it has to start honestly, without minimizing what is actually happening and without pretending that the solution is simply a matter of individual attitude.
Gen Z did not create this crisis. They are living inside it. The least we can do is stop looking away.
