The health of young people resists simple solutions

One in five adolescents suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder in OECD countries. This figure has stagnated for ten years despite an explosion in resources devoted to the issue. And among 10-14 year-olds, the suicide rate experienced significant growth in 2020, a year when the entire world barricaded itself at home to protect its children.

Young people’s mental health has become one of the major public policy issues of the 2020s. It attracts funding, reports, and opinion pieces. It mobilizes social networks themselves — with an irony that no one misses. But the dominant political response, centered on restricting screens, runs up against a more complex reality: the OECD report published on April 29, 2026 on the mental health of children, adolescents and young adults in the 21st century documents 159 pages of transnational data that converge toward the same finding. The cause is multiple. The solution must be as well.

The essentials

  • Depressive and anxiety disorders are progressing in almost all OECD countries since 2010, with visible acceleration after 2020.
  • The suicide rate among 10-14 year-olds increased concerning in 2020, on low absolute numbers but in a worrying trend over time.
  • The April 2026 OECD report (159 pages, 38 countries) contradicts the mono-causal explanation by social networks: identified factors include climate anxiety, school pressure, social isolation, and economic precarity of families.
  • Countries achieving the best results combine four documented levers: early school prevention, rapid access to services, mental health literacy, and balanced digital regulation.

The figures contradict the simple narrative

The most popular thesis is also the most practical: social networks have made adolescents unhappy, particularly girls. All we need to do is take away their phones. Jonathan Haidt made it famous in The Anxious Generation in 2024; American states followed with laws banning them from classrooms; Australia voted to restrict access to platforms for under-16s.

The problem is that OECD data does not validate this direct causality. The deterioration of young people’s mental health precedes the rise of smartphones in several countries. It affects populations with very different digital usage. And in some countries with high penetration of social networks, adolescent well-being indicators are better than in others that are less connected.

This does not mean that screens have no effect. The data suggest real correlations, notably between intense nighttime usage and sleep quality, between exposure to social comparison content and negative body image in adolescent girls. But correlation is not sufficient to base mono-causal public policy on — and the states that bet on outright prohibition have not yet produced rigorous evaluations of their results.

What the OECD documents is more complex and, frankly, more difficult to solve. Four factors recur consistently in transnational data: school pressure and inequalities in access to education, social isolation aggravated by pandemic years, economic precarity of families, and what researchers call eco-anxiety — distress linked to climate prospects, particularly marked among 16-25 year-olds in wealthy countries.

A generation exposed to cumulative stress

Subjective well-being data from the PISA survey, which the OECD has compiled since 2015, show progressive deterioration in nearly all 38 member countries. The proportion of young people who report feeling lonely at school has increased in a growing number of countries over the past fifteen years. The sense of school belonging — a solid predictive indicator of long-term mental health — has declined in a large majority of member countries.

These figures predate 2020. The pandemic amplified trends already underway, it did not create the crisis ex nihilo. Schools in OECD countries were closed for an average of between 10 and 22 weeks (depending on definitions), or 2.5 to 5.5 months, which mainly reinforced already existing inequalities: young people from precarious families, without workspace at home, without cultural capital to organize their time, dropped out disproportionately. And school dropout is itself a documented risk factor for anxiety and depressive disorders.

Eco-anxiety deserves particular attention because it is systematically underestimated in public debate. Several European surveys — including those coordinated by the Royal College of Great Britain and teams from the University of Bath — document that more than 60% of 16 to 25 year-olds in ten countries describe themselves as “very worried” or “extremely worried” about climate change. A significant proportion judge their future to be “frightening.” This distress is not irrational: it stems from a reading of actual data. What makes it pathogenic is the absence of a sense of agency — the impression that nothing one does will change the course of things.

The combination of these factors creates what epidemiologists call a cumulative burden effect: no single factor alone is sufficient to explain a disorder, but their accumulation exceeds the resilience capacities of certain individuals. This is precisely the mechanism that makes mono-causal interventions ineffective.

Countries making progress did not seek the unique solution

The interest of the OECD report lies less in the diagnosis — widely shared — than in the comparison of public policies that produce results. Four levers systematically stand out in countries with the most solid indicators.

The first is early school prevention. Nordic countries, and particularly Finland, have integrated socio-emotional competencies into school curricula starting in primary school. Not as an optional “well-being” hour, but as a cross-curricular discipline evaluated and taken seriously by teachers. The idea is simple: developing the capacity to name one’s emotions, to manage failure, to maintain stable social relationships reduces the risk of crisis in adolescence. Finnish data show a correlation between the introduction of these programs and the stabilization of school distress indicators.

The second lever is rapid access to services. In several OECD countries, the median waiting time for a first consultation in child psychiatry far exceeds what experts consider acceptable. This prolonged wait is often the time it takes for a disorder to become firmly established. Australia has set up first-line consultation centers for 12-25 year-olds — the “headspace centres” — which allow initial contact without prior medical referral, without long waiting lists, with mixed teams (psychologists, social workers, peer helpers). The network now has more than 160 sites. Independent evaluations published in The Lancet Psychiatry show a significant reduction in the duration between first signs of distress and first care.

The third lever, less visible but equally solid in the data, is mental health literacy. The capacity to recognize symptoms of an anxiety or depressive disorder — in oneself, in those around us — conditions access to care. In countries where this literacy is low, young people consult late, often at the crisis stage. Programs like Mental Health First Aid, deployed in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, train teachers, parents and peers to recognize warning signals and provide guidance. The United Kingdom has included mental health in compulsory school curricula since 2020.

The fourth lever concerns digital regulation. The OECD does not recommend prohibition, but targeted regulation of the most harmful features: recommendation algorithms maximizing engagement time, absence of default limits on nighttime notifications, age-unverified access to content involving intense social comparison. The distinction is important: it is not the social network as such that is problematic, but the engagement architecture designed to maximize retention metrics at the expense of user well-being.

Funding without dispersal: the implementation challenge

Identifying the right package of policies is one thing. Funding it, coordinating it and evaluating it is another. And this is where OECD data reveal a second problem, distinct from the first: young people’s mental health is structurally underfunded relative to its epidemiological weight.

In most member countries, mental health represents between 10 and 14% of total disease burden. It receives a significantly smaller share of health budgets. And of this budget, the share devoted to under-25s is even more reduced. This imbalance is not new, but it is documented more precisely in the 2026 report than in previous editions.

Fragmentation is the other obstacle. Young people’s mental health touches on education, child protection, social policies, public health and, increasingly, digital regulation. Five different ministries, five distinct budgetary logics, five evaluation cycles that do not communicate. Countries making progress are those that have created interministerial coordination mechanisms with clear mandates and sustained funding, not advisory committees without budgets.

Iceland is often cited as a textbook case for its adolescent addiction prevention policies in the 1990s-2000s — an approach that combined structured extracurricular activities, parental support and reduction of unstructured drifting spaces. The results were spectacular on substance use indicators. The same systemic model, applied to mental health broadly, is what OECD data suggest as the most promising path.

What governments can do now

The April 2026 report is not a document of lamentation. It is organized around operational recommendations, ranked by level of evidence and budgetary feasibility. It is not a magic roadmap. It is a tool for governments that want to move forward without waiting for the perfect solution.

Three recommendations stand out as priorities for their documented cost/impact ratio. The first is the integration of socio-emotional competencies into primary school curricula, with initial teacher training integrated — not optional continuing education ignored after the first year. The second is the creation of first-line access points for 12-25 year-olds, with guaranteed waiting times of less than two weeks for initial evaluation. The third is the requirement for digital platforms to disable by default the most harmful features for minor users, with an independent annual audit.

None of these measures is free. None will produce visible results in six months. But the OECD has weighed the cost of inaction: a young adult who suffered from an untreated mental disorder in adolescence faces a significantly increased risk of experiencing repeated episodes of unemployment and chronically higher health spending. The social cost, calculated over a lifetime, far exceeds preventive investment.

Young people’s mental health is a subject where the complexity of the problem is real, not an excuse for inaction. The data exists. International comparisons provide models. What is most often lacking is the will to fund policies over time whose effects are measured over ten years, not at the next election cycle.

The pertinent political question is not “what to do?” — the OECD report answers that with precision. It is rather: in which countries are the political conditions in place to implement this complete package, and how can we ensure that others join them?

Sources

  1. OECD, Child, Adolescent and Youth Mental Health in the 21st Century (April 2026) — https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/child-adolescent-and-youth-mental-health-in-the-21st-century_1092c3cb-en.html
  2. Hickman C. et al., Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change, The Lancet Planetary Health (2021) — University of Bath / Royal College of Psychiatrists
  3. Patel V. et al., evaluations of the headspace program Australia, The Lancet Psychiatry
  4. Mental Health First Aid International — deployment data (Canada, Australia, United Kingdom)
  5. PISA survey on school well-being, OECD — 2015, 2018, 2022 editions
  6. Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation, Penguin Press (2024)
  7. OECD Report Child, Adolescent and Youth Mental Health in the 21st Century (April 29, 2026) — https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/sub-issues/mental-health.html
  8. WHO — Adolescent mental health — https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-mental-health
  9. UNESCO — School closures COVID-19 — https://www.aefinfo.fr/depeche/644588
  10. Lancet Planetary Health (2021) — Eco-anxiety in young people — https://www.action-climatique.com/sante-et-environnement/changement-climatique-et-sante/eco-anxiete-chez-les-jeunes-reconnaitre-comprendre-et-soulager-l-impact-emotionnel-du-changement-climatique/
  11. Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation (2024) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxious_Generation
  12. Smartphone ban laws in classrooms — American states — https://laminute.info/2024/09/24/la-californie-rejoint-14-etats-americains-qui-restreignent-et-interdisent-les-smartphones-a-lecole/