Gen Z is mental health-minded

Generation Z is willing to talk about mental health, and they have a lot to talk about.

More than 40% of adults aged 18-24 have a diagnosed mental illness, according to a study by Harmony Healthcare IT, a data management firm that works with health data.

Gen Z is generally considered to be anyone born between 1997 and 2012.

“During the most formative years of their lives, Gen Z has been front and center to some of the most unprecedented events in U.S. and global history,” Harmony Healthcare IT said on their website. “One of the biggest being the pandemic, which will have a lasting impact on the future of technology, healthcare, and even mental health.”

Nearly two thirds of Gen Z feel willing to open up about their own mental illness and 85% are willing to talk about mental health generally, according to the study.

“People share their mental health because they don’t want to feel alone,” said McKayla Harmon, a 23-year-old who grew up in Boise and now lives in Rathdrum.

When Harmon was 15, her mother became desperate from watching her struggle with anorexia and took her to a psychiatrist.

After asking her a few questions, Harmon’s psychiatrist diagnosed her with depression on her first visit and nearly diagnosed her with bipolar disorder on following visits. She was prescribed five different medications in a period of three months.

Harmon refused to go back to the psychiatrist and stopped taking her medications.

She later developed the skills to manage her mental health without medications. Now she looks at that time as building strength in her life.

“When you’ve seen the darkest part of yourself, you can understand the darkest part of someone else,” Harmon said.

Harmon is now a mentor for Integrated Interventions, a private company that helps young adults transition into society.

Harmon coaches other Gen Z students with mental health issues to help them move beyond their diagnosis and be productive adults.

She believes her mental health experience helps her relate to the people she coaches and makes her a better mentor.

The kids aren’t alright

“What we’re seeing is kids have all these feelings and they don’t know how to describe them,” said Raelynn Loken, a mental health specialist for Coeur d’Alene School District.

Loken works directly with teachers, and as necessary, with students, responding to mental health events as they arise. She’s seeing mental health struggles in younger Gen Z students that are consistent with those seen in Gen Z adults.

“The need is greater than our capacity,” Loken said.

She also teaches mental health skills and provides resources to staff and the community to help them better understand the mental health needs of the district.

Loken’s position was created in response to the trauma students and staff experienced in the wake of multiple suicides that touched the Coeur d’Alene School District in 2018. The goal of the role was managing the mental health problems that were not being addressed in the district.

For mental health week, high school leadership students hosted a mental health booth in The Salvation Army Kroc Center, where they connected people from the community to resources.

“There’s relief that there’s an answer and it’s shared in other people like them,” Loken said.

The district also introduced a mental health coordinator position and hired Keith Orchard. He builds a mental health strategy to empower Loken and teaching staff to work with students.

Because studies cannot be done including minors without permission from their parents, it's easier, Orchard said, to get data on the adults in the Gen Z age bracket.

He isn’t sure if there is more awareness of mental health issues that were always there, because Generation Z is more open about mental health, or if there are more mental health issues now than there were before.

“Now everybody has a mental diagnosis is how I see it,” Harmon said. “Because that’s how it feels in my generation. So it’s not weird.”

Weight of the world

Nearly three quarters of Gen Zers say the pandemic has negatively impacted their mental health, according to Harmony Healthcare IT. And nearly a third of their age group rate their mental health as “bad.”

“Teachers didn’t have enough skill or capacity during the pandemic to help people," Loken said. “We are seeing typical behavioral modification skills are not working.”

Mental health diagnoses have surged since the pandemic. The largest increases in mental illnesses have been anxiety and depression according to Harmony Healthcare IT.

Loken has seen huge increases in anxiety and depression in students from before the pandemic, before the specialist position was created and still sees those surges.

“We can be inundated with negative messaging and negative stories more than before we had technology,” Orchard said. “It's fairly universal. The optimism in the world right now is greatly reduced.”

Orchard listed a looming economic downturn, inflation, war in Ukraine and political partisanship, as some of the heavy ideas teens are dealing with in their environment.

With the constancy of information through social media and the internet, Gen Z can no longer escape information, or find places for boredom, downtime or retreat.

“People feel less safe,” Orchard said.

Young people are immersed in broader problems more frequently with access to stories everywhere.

“There’s this level of secondary trauma of sadness they're experiencing across the world,” Loken said.

Many Gen Zers are opting to withdraw from those stressors to protect their mental health.

“I refused to watch the news during the pandemic,” Harmon said. “And I don’t have TikTok, I don’t have Snapchat and I refuse to get those things.”

Over half of adults under 24 have taken breaks from social media to protect their mental health, according to Harmony Healthcare IT. And 36% have deleted social media accounts for the same reason.

“You get to a point where you’re not really living in the world,” Harmon said. “You’re living in a phone, in an app. I didn’t want to be a slave to desire. Desire is a barrel full of holes, and social media is just something you keep scrolling through, and you think you’re going to get somewhere but you never do.”

Harmon has deleted apps for her mental health because she was addicted to them, and still opts not to keep access to her social media in an app.

She was 8 or 9 when she got her first social media account. Her parents welcomed social media as an exciting technological advancement.

“They weren’t scared of it,” Harmon said. “They should’ve been. I don’t think they had enough knowledge of it yet to understand how it would impact minds.”

Objectively, social media is bad for mental health, Orchard said.

“There are good things about social media but studies have shown that prolonged social media use has negative impacts on mental health,” he continued. “Moving away from social media is better for mental health.”

It’s getting better

Since the creation of their positions, Orchard and Loken haven’t seen any deaths by suicide in the Coeur d’Alene School District.

They have seen suicide attempts or ideations, but no deaths.

Orchard and Loken have introduced programs like Sources of Strength to combat mental health crises, and they have watched anecdotal progress in their schools.

Sources of Strength is a program that teaches students to build connections to their peers and find their personal value within their community.

“I think that’s where Gen Z really struggles, because you’ll never be good enough,” Harmon said. “You’ll never take a good enough picture.”

Loken and Orchard have trained staff with QPR, or Question, Persuade, Refer: a response process for trainees to be able to recognize the warning signs of suicidal thinking, and redirect to a trained professional.

Loken equips teachers and students with the language to discern their feelings.

For example, with anxiety there are physical symptoms like butterflies in the stomach. And kids can use those familiar symptoms to describe how they feel, and then have the tools to talk about what they’re processing.

With shared language, students are seeing other people around them sharing those same feelings, which Loken believes helps people to connect to each other.

“I think everyday you're expected to have some mental illness, but I disagree,” Harmon said. “And I don’t think a mental illness is something that has to be forever.”