Mental Health: They were the future once

On July 16, the Office for National Statistics released the latest figures concerning well-being among the population of Great Britain. With regard to mental health, they make uneasy reading. For all ages, the lockdown caused a peak in anxiety levels. Since then, anxiety levels have dropped again, but consistently remain higher than the pre-lockdown level (figure 1).

Matters related to well-being are assessed by the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey and so are subjective and determined by self-perception and sample selection. One set of data is based on the response from students about their ‘life satisfaction’. This is scored from 1 to 10 (‘not at all’ to ‘completely’) and the results show that the student population has scored significantly and consistently lower average satisfaction levels than adults since last December (figure 2).