You can’t talk about protecting young people’s mental health without addressing the cost of living. Not if you want us to listen.
Tuning in to the PHAA’s preventive mental health symposium recently, I began to wonder if I had somehow been teleported to another planet.
In a panel discussion titled ‘What works to promote and protect young people’s mental health?’ two of the panellists spoke of young people’s priorities for improving mental health.
VicHealth CEO Dr Sandro Demaio said young people surveyed for the state’s $45 million Future Healthy initiative had revealed three priorities for improving young people’s mental health today.
“They wanted us to address climate change, but articulated that through food and food systems; they wanted to have free, non-competitive, local opportunities to get active; and they wanted to reconnect and have an opportunity to be involved, particularly in the art sector,” Dr Demaio said.
“It’s a sense of identity, connection, belonging, opportunity that comes out of being part of an arts program or being part of the local footy club, or for women and girls, getting involved in sport.
“We need to make sure they’re not the first to be chopped in a difficult fiscal environment.”
Following Dr Demaio, Wesley Chen, representative for Prevention United’s Youth Advisory Group, identified a lack of social connectedness and the environments shaping one’s level of connectedness with others as the key issues affecting young people’s mental health.
“Today I can offer some insights into what I think from a young person’s perspective is really needed in terms of prevention,” Mr Chen said.
“The first is culture, and the second is environment.
“Culture in terms of the relationships we have as young people, whether it be with those in positions of authority or with other young people, and environment is really the context which predisposes and almost predetermined the sort of culture that we would have.
“The key message that I want to share with you today is the importance of establishing open channels of dialogue for young people.”
Listening to each panellist discuss what they thought were the most acute concerns for young people’s mental health, and the most effective interventions to address them, I was struck by the lack of any reference to the cost-of-living crisis, or housing affordability or job insecurity, three issues that go hand in hand.
I do not wish to diminish the importance of the concerns identified by Dr Demaio and Mr Chen. If anything, speaking to a colleague my age about what she thought were the factors most severely affecting our generation’s mental health only reiterated to me the importance of friendships and regular exercise in regularly maintaining one’s mental wellbeing.
However, it is difficult to understate the devastating impact the cost-of-living crisis is having on young people’s mental health, let alone the bleak picture recent research paints for decades, if not generations to come.
According to the third annual Australian Youth Barometer, a Monash University survey of 571 Australians aged between 18 and 24 released in November 2023, nine out of 10 respondents said that they had experienced financial difficulties in the past year.
Almost three-quarters (72%) of respondents believed they’d never be able to buy a home and 40% felt they may not have a comfortable place to live in the next 12 months. One out of five respondents said they had experienced food insecurity in the past 12 months.
According to a Mission Australia survey of teenagers aged 15 to 19, 31% of participants said the economy and financial matters were the most important concerns affecting young people, compared to 11% in 2021.
I myself have long given up the idea that I’ll ever be able to afford my own home. I can’t say it ever felt within my grasp.
Only by sheer luck have I managed to secure a small rental apartment, located peripherally in Sydney’s inner west, and working full-time as a journalist I’m able to get by relatively comfortably. My position is the exception, not the rule for my generation and in the current environment it feels increasingly like a house of cards that could come crumbling down at any moment.
Like Dr Demaio and Mr Chen, or anyone working in or around the mental health system, I recognise the futility of addressing just one factor among the vast network of interrelated forces that shape mental health, nor can mental health prevention be regarded, as Mr Chen said, as “a series of isolated incidents”.
What I take issue with is a panel framed at youth mental health prevention and promotion not referencing, even in passing, what young people have said over and over again is the most pressing concern for their mental health.
As one survey participant in the Australian Youth Barometer survey, an ACT resident living in a rented caravan, said to researchers:
“I need to be able to shower, have a place to get ready, eat, all that. That’s really the only concern in life.”
While access to free, non-competitive exercise and creative arts programs is undoubtedly vital for preventing ill-health and maintaining mental wellbeing, what works to protect young people’s mental health is having secure, affordable housing, food security, a regular source of income – being able to look a year or five years into the future without it making your stomach churn in fear.
How far can preventive mental health interventions encouraging exercise, healthy eating or creative expression go towards promoting youth mental health, when so many young people are being deprived of their most fundamental needs?