Young Australians' mental health is recovering. Teenagers are recovering slowest.

Young Australians' mental health, which dropped sharply during the pandemic, has started recovering — unevenly. A UNSW Sydney analysis of 24 years of national survey data found under-25s lost roughly 5 points on a 100-point psychological wellbeing scale between 2019 and 2021, and had regained only 2 to 3 of those points by 2024 [s1].

Where the data comes from

The analysis draws on the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, which has tracked tens of thousands of Australians annually for 24 years, using the SF-36 scale — a standard 100-point self-reported measure of psychological wellbeing — across seven age cohorts [s1]. A dataset that long and that consistently structured is unusual for tracking mental health trends: most mental health surveys don't run continuously across a quarter century with the same methodology, which is what lets this analysis compare the 2019–2021 decline against a genuine historical baseline rather than against a single prior survey wave.

The recovery gap between two groups both called "young"

The 2 to 3 point recovery isn't distributed evenly within the under-25 population. Australians aged 19 to 24 rebounded roughly twice as fast as their younger counterparts, recovering close to two-thirds of their pandemic-era decline [s1]. Teenagers aged 15 to 18 recovered only about a third of what they lost [s1] — meaning the age group experiencing the steepest initial decline is also the one lagging furthest behind in the recovery. Lead author Dr. Sergey Alexeev's summary of where that leaves things is blunt: "Mental health among young Australians in 2024 still remains below where it was before the pandemic" [s1] — a statement that applies to both age groups, just less severely to the older one.

The gender gap sitting underneath the age gap

Across the models in the analysis, young women scored 6.4 to 6.6 points lower than young men on the same wellbeing scale [s1] — a gap larger than the pandemic-era decline itself. That's a striking comparison: the gender gap in youth mental health, as measured by this analysis, is a bigger number than the entire drop the pandemic caused. The available reporting doesn't specify whether that gender gap widened, narrowed, or held steady over the pandemic period specifically, only that it's present in the current data.

What this study can't tell you

Dr. Alexeev's team describes the analysis as descriptive rather than diagnostic — it relies on self-reported symptoms on a standardized scale, not clinical diagnoses, and the study doesn't identify what specifically caused either the initial decline or the partial rebound [s1]. That's an important limit: a study built to track a population trend over decades isn't designed to isolate causal mechanisms, so it can establish that teenagers are recovering more slowly than young adults without explaining why — school disruption, social media use, economic pressure, and other candidate explanations aren't distinguished from each other in this data.

What to watch next

Whether the gap between teenagers' and young adults' recovery trajectories closes in future survey waves, or whether it reflects something structurally different about adolescence during and after a disruption like the pandemic — and whether Australia's upcoming National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Agreement negotiations specifically target the slower-recovering teenage cohort this data identifies, rather than treating "youth mental health" as a single undifferentiated category.