Goodbye to the unhappiness curve: emotional distress appears at younger ages

BarcelonaSince 2008, well-being throughout the human lifespan has been represented as a U-shaped graph. According to this idea, people's happiness is high during childhood and youth, but declines over the years until it reaches its lowest point around the age of forty or fifty, a decline linked to the stress and worries of life. After that age, well-being begins to rise again. This theory is popularly known as the "happiness curve." When this U curve inverts, economists begin to refer to it as an "unhappiness curve," since it represents the discomfort associated with age. However, a study now claims that the deterioration of young people's mental health has eliminated the typical behavior of this curve.

The main conclusion of the research, led by David Blanchflower –one of the developers of the happiness curve theory– from Dartmouth College (USA), in collaboration with other researchers, is that the classic pattern of unhappiness according to age (inverted U) has disappeared, since the mental discomfort It has increased among young people and then decreases with age. The authors claim that this is the first study to demonstrate this trend and attribute the deterioration of youth mental health as the main cause of this change. They also detail that this is a global phenomenon.

The results, published this Wednesday in the scientific journal PLOS One, represent a huge shift from previous research, which found that mental distress peaked in middle age. For this reason, the authors warn of the serious mental health crisis facing today's youth, which needs to be addressed.

The study identifies several factors that could explain young people's emotional distress, including limited economic power, difficulty accessing housing, and the impact of social media. Along these lines, Roger Ballescà, psychologist and vice-secretary of the Official College of Psychology of Catalonia, asserts that today's youth have "reasons to worry," such as those cited in the study.

Uncertainty about the future

"If we think that young people are turning their backs on this, we're mistaken," says Ballescà. She explains that this difficulty adapting to social reality is leading to an increase in the demand for mental health care among young people and children due to so-called "adaptive" (or reactive) disorders, which are those that arise in a specific social, economic, or cultural context. Examples of this include anxiety and eating disorders.

Beyond this uncertainty about the future, Ballescà identifies other factors that influence young people's discomfort: "We live in a society with a very superficial model of happiness based on hedonism—centered on pleasure—in which happiness is understood as the absence of discomfort," she says. She also emphasizes that social media has exacerbated this (especially through social comparisons) and has generated a very high social expectation about what it means to be happy. "Discomfort is not considered a constituent part of living, but rather an irregularity," she emphasizes.

Ballescà agrees with the study that the COVID-19 pandemic has been a "catalyst" for this situation, and not a cause. "The lockdown accelerated trends that were already in place, as mental health consultations were on the rise before 2019," he says, and there's no doubt the situation would explode sooner or later.

Not everything is a mental disorder

"The fact that young people express more unhappiness than before doesn't mean they have more mental disorders," the expert clarifies, and considers it essential to emphasize that happiness is a "very subjective" concept and it is risky to link it to mental health, although they often go hand in hand. "Otherwise, we could imply that an unhappy person means they have a mental health problem," he warns.

To give an example, the expert explains that a person going through a difficult economic situation will feel unhappy as a result, but that does not mean they have a mental illness. By this, he refers once again to the fact that it is a type of unhappiness linked to the environment—that is, to the previously mentioned adaptive disorders—and should be treated from a social, not a health, perspective, as it is not strictly a mental illness like psychosis.

In light of this situation, Maite Garaigordobil, PhD in psychology and specialist in clinical psychology, emphasizes that the study leads to a series of educational and social implications that should be addressed. Speaking to the SMC, she comments that it is necessary to reinforce the need to develop strategies in educational centers to identify signs of distress, promote spaces for dialogue where students can express concerns and talk about their mental health problems in order to eradicate the stigma surrounding this area, as well as design public policies that support new generations in the face of this. She also emphasizes the need to further investigate the causes of this increase in distress and mental health problems in adolescence and young adulthood.