Ah, another great May science (and engineering) graduation ceremony. Did you know that New Zealand universities typically hold graduation twice a year, in May and in December? Why May? Well … that’s because England, where many of our academic traditions, and our original academics, came from, didn’t trust us enough to mark the final exams for ourselves. This meant end-of-year exams were placed on a ship, taken back to the motherland for marking and/or moderation, and then shipped back. Months later. So students had to wait until May to graduate.
Anyhoo. Along with my academic co-parent, Associate Professor Terry Fleming, I proudly applauded our shared PhD student, Kylie Sutcliffe, across the stage.
Sutcliffe’s PhD was a comprehensive analysis of youth mental health using the Youth 2019 Rangatahi Smart Survey, supplemented with analysis of what young people say they want for their mental health, and what people who work to deliver youth mental health think needs to be done.
“This is the best discussion of the status of New Zealand’s youth mental health that we have seen,” said her examiners.
I thought of Kylie’s research as I listened to media coverage of the latest Unicef Innocenti Report Card 19. It draws together data collected between 2018 and 2022, and it looks bad for New Zild.
Compared with the other 35 countries for which complete data was available, we ranked 36th for mental health. We ranked 35th of 40 for physical health and 25th for academic proficiency and social skills.
A more detailed drilldown shows that we’ve improved at least 5% for youth mortality by accident or illness over the five-year period, but we’ve deteriorated by more than 5% in terms of youth suicide. Yup, the graph couldn’t make it starker; the New Zealand youth suicide rate is almost 50% poorer than the next worst country ‒ Estonia.
The Youth 19 survey captured the views of more than 7000 of our young people, just before the Covid-19 pandemic. I’ll come back to the pandemic in a sec. So, the data are six years old. Kylie’s work, supported by the rest of the Youth 19 syndicate of researchers, shows a large decline in mental health in 2019, compared with relatively stable results from previous surveys in this research series (in 2000, 2007 and 2012). Fewer young people reported good mental health and more reported depression symptoms, suicidal thoughts and behaviours.
Importantly, this deterioration in wellbeing was distributed unequally across our young people. Young females, Māori and Pasifika, those living in more deprived areas, and gender and sexual minorities saw the greatest declines. Predictors of this disparity included greater exposure to sexual harm and discrimination.
The scary thing is that both the Youth 19 and Unicef data, predate the “end” of Covid-19 as a pandemic in May 2023, and we know from international research that youth wellbeing has declined even further. But, when you’re 36th out of 36, there’s nowhere else to fall.
One of the things that has been implicated in this decline is social media, and we’re seeing a miniature moral panic right now about whether to ban under-16s from social media. My position on this has shifted. The Act Party opposes legislative intervention, arguing this is an issue that can be solved by better education of parents. Um, nope. What could we possibly do in the parental education space that we’re not doing currently?
Let me make it clear: the Youth 19 research says that solving the youth mental health crisis will take more than cutting back on TikTok (remember sexual harm and discrimination), but I’m with South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas on this when he said, “How will we make it worse if we implement a ban?”
