How are our young people doing? This is the title that caps the most recent survey on the psychological health of 12-25 year olds, which offers complex answers to this thorny question. Some, very worrying, should mobilize several ministries, there, now, and more broadly all of Quebec society.
A nation that neglects its youth digs its own grave. This mortal sin, all countries have cultivated in spite of themselves while juggling the contingencies of a global pandemic. Unfortunately, we reap what we sow. Our young people still haven’t regained their full pre-COVID-19 vigor. In secondary school, they are now four out of ten to declare anxious or depressive symptoms. At CEGEP and university, this proportion is one in two. We repeat: one out of two.
Even more worrying, one in four young people reports having nurtured dark thoughts, 10% of them in a sustained way. Let’s face it, harboring dark thoughts is not hyperbole here. In the specific context of this study, it means bluntly “having thought that one would be better off dead or having thought about harming oneself during the last two weeks”. This malaise has nothing to do with whimsy, it is even, for some, deep, especially among secondary school girls, who are over-represented in this category.
By isolating our young people for their safety and that of the most fragile among us, we have impoverished and reduced their frank contacts. This erosion is not just a pandemic result. It is also the fruit of a time that rushes headlong into dematerialization. These two phenomena put together have ensured that our young people have focused more than ever on work and their screens and less on rich and deep relationships in person, argues the DD Mélissa Généreux, medical advisor to Public Health in Estrie and responsible for this investigation.
This isolation colors all their attachments. Our young people have fewer deep friendships to confide in, their families are smaller, often divided, their teachers are overwhelmed and exhausted, the workers on whom they should be able to rely are overwhelmed and in perpetual lack of resources. However, what our young people need most at the moment is precisely people they can confide in to “start the first dialogue”, according to the happy expression of the DD Generous. This also implies training and more resources for these caregivers.
This “first dialogue” is indeed one of the essential keys to increasing the well-being and positive mental health of our young people. The objective is crucial. It comes up almost word for word in the INSPQ monitoring report entitled Suicidal behavior in Quebec: portrait 2023 released earlier this month. Again, the news was especially worrying for young girls. Teenage girls aged 15 to 19 show the greatest increase in the rate of hospitalizations for attempted suicide. The 10 to 14 year olds are not left out, the suicide attempt rate having more than doubled in ten years among them.
This female over-representation is not unique to Quebec; it can be observed in other countries such as Australia and the United States. It could be partly explained by a greater propensity to seek help. So much the better. But it’s not the kind of cry of alarm that can wait. Public Health must get out of its pandemic obsessions and the Ministry of Health, out of its obtuse management of waiting lists. Collateral damage is all over the eyes of our youth. Three files will have to receive their full attention and that of the government.
The first concerns the use of social media which fosters an overreliance on social validation, especially among girls. Young people spending at least 4 hours a day on social networks report twice as much anxiety or depression as those who spend half as much. The second is related to the rise of vaping among high school students. Those who practice it are nearly twice as likely to report anxious or depressive symptoms as those who don’t.
The third is perhaps the most surprising. The number of working young people has increased dramatically, including among the very young. No less than 54% of young people in the first secondary have a small job. All ages combined, they are also more numerous than ever to work more than 15 hours. The problem is that these people report anxiety or depression a little more often than the others. Minister Boulet’s bill to better regulate child labor could not be better timed.
Asked in the House about these gloomy statistics last week, the Legault government did not seek to deny the darkness of the diagnosis. However, putting in place mechanisms to increase the well-being of young people and equip them with positive adaptation strategies will require enormous concerted efforts, which only cross-partisan mobilization can hope for.