Why Resilience Won’t Solve the Mental Health Crisis Among Young People

Why Resilience Won’t Solve the Mental Health Crisis Among Young People

We are in the middle of an absolute mental health crisis with children, rising rates of anxiety, depression, etc. The response to this crisis tends to help people focus on resilience, on teaching young people to recover from adversity. It’s important to be resilient, but personal responsibility for systemic solutions is neither fair nor effective.

What Is the Mental Health Crisis? A Complicated Matter

The youth mental health crisis, especially in high-income countries, is complex and multi factorial and is driven by a variety of interlinked factors, such as economic insecurity, academic pressure, social media pressure and global uncertainty due to climate change. They create an environment in which young people are more vulnerable than ever. Resilience training — teaching coping skills and stress management techniques — provides tools for the short term, but does nothing to intervene at the source.

The Limits of Resilience

Resilience often assumes a type of personal responsibility — that individuals merely need to face obstacles with grit, determination. But this point of view [ignores the broader societal and structural realities that underlie these problems and complicate mental illness. For example:

Economic Inequality: Financial precocity and the lack of access to pay for mental health treatment create barriers that resilience can’t overcome.

The Myth of the Academic Hero: The pervasive myth that resilience training can remedy the stress and burnout that comes with academic competition only serves to exacerbate this toxic environment.

Social Media: Our daily exposure to the curated, perfect lives of other people on the internet gives us low self-esteem that manifests in cyber-bullying — issues with systemic roots that we need changes to a platform to address instead of ways to cope with it on our own.

An emphasis on resilience risks oversimplifying the mental health crisis, as if people with mental health struggles are paladins of failure and their struggle has to do with a lack of will — and it is stigmatising help-seeking in the process.

We Need Systemic Solutions

An individual-based approach can’t fix a mental health crisis with the wider generation. Systemic changes are crucial:

Access To Mental Health Services: To support young people when they need it most, access must be affordable and accessible mental health care.

Education policy: Schools should be required to treat mental health as an urgent issue — integrating it into curricula and giving it precedence over high-stakes testing.

Social Media Regulation: Make platforms responsible for harmful content and their algorithms’ impact on mental health.

Social Welfare: Solutions that address youth unemployment and create pathways to stable income can ease some barriers to mental health.

A Balanced Approach

And not that there are no merits to resilience. Offering coping strategies and emotional regulation gives young people tools to navigate the many uncertain aspects of life. But resilience should be a supplement — not a replacement — for broader approaches to systemic problems. Human-centred design shifts the lens from expecting people to flourish in dysfunctional systems towards building healthy systems.

SO what should we do

Part of the youth mental health crisis is far more complex than a silver bullet solution. Resilience training plays a part but it is not a panacea. Placing systemic transformations on the same plane as personal growth endeavors is essential to building a future where young people can thrive. Insuring greater resilience to those challenges isn’t enough, we need to solve for them at source.