The millennial seems to have gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to issues like finances compared to the generations that came before them. Unfortunately, money isn’t the only serious problem that they have to contend with.
According to data from organizations like Blue Cross Blue Shield, millennials suffer from higher rates of mental illness and burnout than other age groups.
Let’s find out what’s causing this phenomenon and how it’s negatively affecting people aged 24 to 39 (in 2020).
Faster Decline
Pressmaster/Shutterstock – Health shocks limit millennials’ ability to work and earn further exacerbating their situation
A 2019 report from Blue Cross Blue Shield, found that both millennials’ mental and physical health are declining faster than Gen Xers as they age. Millennials saw a 40% uptick in mortality compared to the generation directly before them.
This has been attributed to the lack of proper management and treatment of ailments. It also doesn’t help that millennials also experience higher rates of depression and other behavioral issues that contribute to them experiencing ‘health shocks’.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defined health shocks as unpredictable illnesses that diminish a person’s overall health status.
Rise in Depression
While depression rates have been on the rise across age groups in the past couple of years, millennials’ diagnoses are rising at a faster rate for teens and millennials.
Overall, people aged 18 to 34 years old saw an increase in major depression diagnoses from 3% to 4.4%. Major depression, which is characterized by persistent feelings of sadness, despair, and low mood, has also been found to have the highest prevalence rate among all illnesses affecting millennials.
These numbers are based on a Blue Cross Blue Shield report that analyzed 55 million American millennials with commercial insurance in 2017. Some medical professionals have attributed this concerning phenomenon to the lack of face-to-face interactions that younger people have with others paired with increased screen time.
‘Deaths of Despair’
Similarly, ‘deaths of despair’, while observed to have increased for people across all ages, were observed to rise significantly more among millennials.
In 2017, deaths of despair took the lives of 36,000 millennials in the United States. The most common cause of these deaths was drug overdose with opioids as the main culprits.
Experts attribute this uptick in the observation that young adults are more likely to engage in risk-taking behaviors like enrolling in military service.
