Why Gen Z is so open about anxiety and mental health

Gen-Z generally approach mental health with far more open-mindedness and grace than those older than us, yet we’re still the ‘most depressed’ generation ever. I’ve pushed back on this in my writing and in my daily life, older friends and family insisting it has to do with my phone and not what my phone is telling me about the world and its collapse.

It’s because we, and Millennials, got rid of the stigma.

While medical attention for mental health problems is on the rise, the likelihood for a doctor to diagnose a case has risen as well. Scientific, medical, and mental health advocacy communities are still finding new ways to diagnose, treat, classify, and in some cases cure the mental health problems of people everywhere, as the rate is still rising.

Data from the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) showed that between 1999 and 2017, children under 16 became more likely to experience at least one mental disorder; the rates rose from 11.4 to 13.6 percent. A 2021 UNICEF report stated similar results, that 13 per cent of ten- to nineteen-year-olds around the world have been diagnosed with a mental health disorder, while “suicide is the fourth leading cause of death for young people aged 15 to 19.”

In general, teenagers and young adults are more likely to experience mental health problems, chiefly anxiety and depression, due to changes in the brain during adolescence and the widespread lack of stability in the lives of young people. Then there are factors such as moving away from home, managing your schedule and work or schooling all on your own, or managing your finances, which contribute to the stress.

Going through any one of those struggles made — still makes me — try and tear out my hair from the anxiety.

The freedom to be honest

The difference is, where past generations have to convince themselves, nothing is wrong, or they’re crazy or weak or a disgrace to all the people who can ‘just stop being depressed,’ we don’t have to. I can remember that I didn’t take my medication or should have gone to the gym and eaten a salad with grilled chicken instead of a fried chicken sandwich with fries.

At least in my group of friends, I can look around at these people and know that they have been to therapy or tried it. Healed or healing, I don’t know someone my age who has not at least tried to learn about their mind, and as is always necessary even if they don’t know it, what it takes to keep their mind as healthy as their body.

Despite the turmoil of the world and the bucket of chemicals, electricity, and intrusive thoughts called the human mind, attempts at discussing those root causes still flounder. Funding goes to interventionism and not mitigating the root causes, and young peoples’ movements in response — SLOW, quiet quitting, tang ping in China — are dismissed as a violation of the rat race our elders were forced to adopt.