Youth mental health: Australia needs to look beyond ills of social media to fix crisis, children’s commissioner says
Addressing children’s mental health is “more complex” than blaming social media and requires investment in social housing and supports through schools, the children’s commissioner has said.
Anne Hollonds spoke to Guardian Australia in a wide-ranging interview about Australian governments’ responses to Covid-19, and a suite of new measures at the federal level to tackle bullying online.
The prime minister, Scott Morrison, has made the affect of social media on youth mental health a focus in the leadup to the 2022 election, campaigning on online safety and arguing reforms are needed, particularly to prevent harassment of women and girls.
Hollonds said she “absolutely” supports the legislation to unmask anonymous social media trolls, the social media inquiry and regime of eSafety commissioner content takedown orders as measures that put “the best interest of children as the first priority” in the “unregulated” digital world.
But Hollonds warned that a decadelong increase in mental health problems including self-harm, which predates the Covid-19 pandemic, has other social and economic dimensions.
“There are some people who might like to say ‘oh it’s all the fault of social media’.
“That’s often the go-to answer as to why kids have mental health problems. I wouldn’t deny it has an effect but it’s not as simple as that, it’s more complex.”
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare data shows in any given year 20% of Australians experience mental ill health and that, even before the pandemic, three-quarters of Australians with mental ill health were under 25.
Sign up to receive an email with the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning One in four Australian teens reported experiencing psychological distress in 2020 and parents have warned that the pandemic and lockdowns have made it harder to find help.
Hollonds said poor youth mental health is a “long-term increasing trend” which Covid has “opened our eyes to in a way we can’t ignore” due to a “spike where there were extended lockdowns”.
“It’s something that obviously worries me hugely … you just have to ask how bad does it have to get before we recognise that we need to make children a national policy priority?”
In addition to the way living in a digital world has “changed the experience of childhood”, Hollonds nominates the financial pressure from the
cost of housing and inadequate support systems as causes.
“For example the education system … for the kids who are struggling, perhaps the old style education system where it’s just about academic learning is not really doing enough for kids,” she said.
“I think Covid has shown schools are about much more than academic learning that can be replaced by zoom.
“By closing schools we actually added pressure to the distress of kids.”
One of the main lessons from the pandemic is that schools “should be the last to close and the first to reopen, because of their importance in the overall wellbeing of children”, Hollonds said.
“In my view … we’ve under-estimated school as a community hub of support for the wellbeing of kids and their families.”
Hollonds said that some other developed countries had better integrated the health and education systems making it “easier for people to get help they need”.
Hollonds said the cost of housing and the “spike in costs during Covid” was also a deeply worrying factor that emerges from her consultation with children, young people and their families.
“It’s those areas with low incomes, higher poverty and disadvantage … outside CBDs, in rural and outer urban areas – [they are] precisely the areas where rents have become unaffordable [during the pandemic].”
Hollonds called on governments to address “under-investment in social housing over decades” and to look at economic drivers of housing costs.
Her comments back calls from other experts for more comprehensive mental health supports and higher income supports to tackle the youth mental health crisis.
In November the former Labor premier of South Australia, Jay Weatherill, who’s now chief executive of Minderoo Foundation’s Thrive by Five initiative, accused the Morrison government of neglecting to assess the affect of the pandemic on young children, with current policies labelled “a series of crisis responses”.
The latest Naplan data has found that Australian schoolchildren’s basic literacy and numeracy skills were relatively unscathed during first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, but gaps are widening between city students and those in regional and remote areas.
Guardian Australia previously reported concerns from teachers that the compounded effects of two years of intermittent learning in some areas are only just beginning to become apparent, especially for younger cohorts (up to grade 2) that are not captured by the Naplan dataset.