It’s a testament to strange times when Tony Blair is seen to be talking sense – particularly when it comes to issues facing the young. But his recent intervention was a welcome one. Appearing on the ‘Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future’ podcast, the former Prime Minister touched on the growing tendency for young people to self-diagnose mental illnesses.
I think we have become very, very focused on mental health and with people self-diagnosing. We’re spending vastly more on mental health now than we did a few years ago. And it’s hard to see what the objective reasons for that are.
Before I’m accused of insensitivity and exiled from social media, the destigmatisation and increased understanding of mental health conditions is undoubtedly a good thing. Long gone are the days of shellshocked troops being shot for cowardice and young single mothers locked up in infirmaries – and we’re all the better for it.
Yet despite having moved on when it comes to the treatment of mental health difficulties, Britons – particularly the young – seem more anxious and depressed than ever. As a young person myself, I have some experience of this. I won’t bore you with my own tribulations, but among my cohort there seems to be an epidemic of anxiety. The numbers back this up.
The charity Mental Health UK released its ‘Burnout Report’ for 2025 this week and the findings are stunning. Last year, almost a third of employees aged 18-24 had to take time off work for stress-related reasons. Some 91% of adults also reported that they experienced extreme levels of pressure and stress in the last year and 29% of workers claim to feel ‘unfulfilled’ at work.
Explanations for this abound. The Baby Boomer line, which Blair appears to share, is that woke Zoomers need to toughen up and stop medicalising themselves for feeling a normal range of emotions. Brutal? Yes. Entirely unfair? Not necessarily. After all, according to Axa Health, 30% of Britons aged 16-24 describe themselves as suffering from depression or anxiety even before seeking an opinion from a mental health professional.
Yet whether you think it’s justified or not, young people are miserable, and something needs to change. It’s hitting our productivity and growth. Work-related stress costs UK businesses £28 billion a year, and sickness absence costs them over £100 billion a year, with mental health accounting for 17% of sick leave. Our economy needs young people to feel happier.
Like many of Britain’s problems, addressing this pervasive listlessness is not easy. One area policymakers could focus on, however, is changing the route young people are expected to take after leaving school. Like so many, I was told by teachers that the only suitable path into the labour market was to spend three years at university drinking, cavorting and studying and then spend months applying to as many internships and jobs as my calloused fingers could manage. The ends are often as soul-destroying as the means, with a number of graduates finding themselves in unsuitable jobs from which they return home only to reckon with the fact that their degree taught them little, bears no relevance to their work and has saddled them with debt.
Under the mantra of ‘education, education, education’, Blair was a key architect of this status quo. In 1999, he announced that he wanted to get 50% of young people into higher education. This was reached in 2019. Yet rather than marking the beginning of an era of unprecedented economic growth, we are facing skills shortages in a number of important sectors and we have a generation of highly educated young people whose qualifications have been utterly devalued.
It does not have to be this way. Blair has called for the numbers going to university to rise yet further. But while higher education is fun and enriching for some, other school leavers might find greater value elsewhere. Harry Phibbs pointed out in CapX this week that fulfilling work is one of life’s most effective tonics for unhappiness. More should be done to encourage late-teens to consider apprenticeships or other forms of vocational further education as an alternative to university.
The state has given it a go and cocked it up. The apprenticeship levy, introduced in 2015 by George Osborne as a tax on businesses to fund apprenticeship programmes, has cost billions and improved almost nothing. Employers should be able to design and fund their own schemes as they please, tailoring them to the specific needs of the company and the demands of the job.
If more young people take such opportunities, providing the state keeps its nose out, the gains could be enormous. Already, almost 80% of businesses say that apprentices increase their productivity overall. Also, consider how happy you’d be. Just imagine the immense satisfaction of rocking up at your mate’s student digs, armed with wads of cash and amusing stories of workplace badinage, while he and his fellow students fight over their last tin of baked beans and regurgitate Michel Foucault. I can already feel myself grinning.
In all seriousness, a wealthy, skilled and professionally satisfied workforce is a happier one. As anyone who has endured tough times will tell you, there is no miracle cure for melancholy – a combination of positive changes is required. For a generation of Britons, however, one suspects that part of what they’re yearning for is the stability, opportunity and fulfilment that the undergraduate experience, and the subsequent graduate job market, so often lacks.
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