A familiar idea in happiness research says people feel worse through their thirties and early forties, then things lift. That classic U-shape, with a midlife low and a late-life rebound, has been taught in classrooms and splashed across headlines for years.

New evidence released challenges that view. The new study reports that the midlife “unhappiness hump” has faded, and that mental ill-being now tends to decline with age.

Midlife distress has declined

A team led by David G. Blanchflower from Dartmouth College analyzed large samples from the United States, the United Kingdom, and a multinational dataset.

“We show this empirical regularity has been replaced by a monotonic decrease in ill-being by age,” wrote Blanchflower.

The drop in the midlife peak is not because older adults suddenly got much happier. The shape changed because younger people’s mental health worsened relative to everyone else.

In U.S. data, middle-aged and older adults look roughly stable over time. Younger groups, especially under 25, report higher distress than cohorts the same age did a decade or two ago. The same broad pattern appears in the U.K. and across dozens of other countries.

Surveys show midlife change

The team used the U.S. BRFSS telephone survey, which asks adults how many days in the past 30 days their mental health was not good.

Since the 1990s, BRFSS has run hundreds of thousands of interviews per year, providing a robust base for trend work, and the mental health days item sits in the official questionnaire.

For the U.K., they turned to UKHLS, also known as Understanding Society, which follows about 40,000 households. Mental health there is captured with the GHQ-12, a 12-item scale that sums to 36 points, where higher scores reflect more distress.

Patterns of well-being and ill-being

To check whether the new pattern shows up globally, the researchers used the Global Minds Project, which assesses mental function using the MHQ. That metric summarizes capabilities across emotional, cognitive, and social domains on a scale that increases with better mental health.

These surveys measure subjective well-being and its counterpart, ill-being. The focus is not a one-time diagnosis by a clinician, but how people say they are doing and functioning.

That matters because policymaking often moves on perceptions and daily experience. As the authors show, the age profile in self-reported mental health has tilted in ways that match other social indicators.

Distress falls with age

Earlier datasets commonly showed a hump in reported worry, stress, and depression, rising into midlife before easing. Today the line looks more like a steady slope downward with age.

Younger adults now report the highest levels of mental ill-being. Older groups look comparatively more stable, which changes the picture for researchers and planners who assumed midlife was the peak period of distress.

The causes of distress in young people are still being debated. One active line of research has found that the rollout of Facebook on U.S. campuses worsened student mental health.

Pandemic disruptions, weak access to timely care, and economic pressures may also play roles. The study authors point to those broad forces as plausible contributors for the last decade’s trend.

Youth mental health crisis

Mortality data capture the stakes in stark terms. In 2020, suicide ranked as the second leading cause of death among people aged 10 to 34 in the United States.

Education data tell a related story about strain and lost learning time. Rising absenteeism and reports of anxiety in schools fit the broader shift toward higher distress among teens and young adults.

Shifting patterns of distress

The new evidence does not say older adults live in perfect happiness. It highlights a relative shift in levels by age that raises concern for youth.

The researchers also do not claim that one single cause explains the change. Social media effects, pandemic exposure, health care access, and labor market scarring could all contribute, and impacts likely differ across communities.

If the highest distress now clusters in youth and early adulthood, then mental health resources should follow the data. Faster access to counseling, school-based supports, and training for primary care would go a long way.

Measurement should keep pace too. Annual reporting that breaks out age bands with consistent cross-sectional methods can catch reversals like this sooner, which helps leaders avoid steering by an outdated map.

The study is published in the journal PLOS ONE.

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