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A recent Blue Cross Blue Shield report found that millennials are seeing their physical and mental health decline at a faster rate than Gen X as they age. Without proper management or treatment, millennials could see a 40% uptick in mortality compared with Gen Xers of the same age, the report found.

Depression is on the rise among millennials.
According to a report analyzing data from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Health Index, major depression diagnoses are rising at a faster rate for millennials and teens compared with any other age group.

Since 2013, millennials have seen a 47% increase in major-depression diagnoses. The overall rate increased from 3 to 4.4% among 18- to 34-year-olds.

The most prominent symptom of major depression is "a severe and persistent low mood, profound sadness, or a sense of despair," according to Harvard Medical School.

These findings were underscored by an additional Blue Cross Blue Shield report on millennial health. It analyzed the data of 55 million commercially insured American millennials, defined as people ages 21 to 36 in 2017. It found that major depression had the highest prevalence rate, or the likelihood of a person having a disease, among health conditions affecting millennials.

"Deaths of despair" are also on the rise.
More millennials are also dying "deaths of despair," or deaths related to drugs, alcohol, and suicide, Jamie Ducharme reported for Time in June, citing a report by the public-health groups Trust for America's Health and Well Being Trust.

While these deaths have increased across all ages in the past 10 years, they've increased the most among younger Americans, Ducharme said. They accounted for the deaths of about 36,000 American millennials in 2017 alone, according to the report. Drug overdoses were the most common cause of death.

The report cites a few reasons behind these upticks young adults are more inclined to engage in risk-taking behaviors, comprise the highest number of enrolled military personnel, and disproportionately live in "high-stress environments" like correctional facilities.

Suicide attempts have especially increased among black youths.
Suicide attempt rates for black youths have increased by 73% from 1991 to 2017, wrote clinical psychologist Inger E. Burnett-Zeiggler in an opinion piece for The New York Times, citing a November 2019 Pediatrics study. According to the study, suicide attempts decreased by 7.5% in the same time frame among white adolescents.
From 2001 to 2017, suicide death rates for black boys ages 13 to 19 increased by 60%; for black girls, that's 182%, according to a study by the Journal of Community Health. Burnett-Zeigler wrote that, in her experience working with black women, childhood abuse and neglect are linked to suicide attempts in their youth.

"Black youths too often receive the messages that their lives are not valued and that they are less deserving of support, nurturing and protection than their peers of other backgrounds," wrote Burnett-Zeiggler, who's an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern Medical School.

"Many black youths are often fighting for their lives in a system actively working against them, which can be exhausting and feel like a pointless, uphill battle," she added.

Money stress isn't just contributing to millennials' mental health it also means not everyone can afford to seek treatment.
While millennials are more likely than previous generations to attend therapy, one in five diagnosed with major depression doesn't seek treatment, according to the Blue Cross report. That might be because of rising healthcare costs.

In fact, more millennials than baby boomers have declined medical or dental treatment because it was too costly, according to an Insider and Morning Consult survey.

Millennials are also lonely.
Millennials don't always have someone to share their mental burdens with they're less likely to have social support than other generations, as they're marrying later and less connected to political or religious communities, according to Ducharme.

In fact, YouGov called millennials "the loneliest generation" based on a survey that polled 1,254 US adults. It found that millennials were more likely to feel lonely than previous generations. Of survey respondents, 30% of millennials said they always or often felt lonely, compared with 20% of Generation X and 15% of boomers.

More millennials also reported in the survey that they had no acquaintances, friends, close friends, or best friends.

And they're dealing with burnout in and out of the workplace.
It's a growing problem in today's workplace because of trends like rising workloads, limited staff and resources, and long hours.

But millennials have reported they suffer from higher rates of burnout than other generations; in a January BuzzFeed article that went viral, Anne Helen Petersen coined the term the "burnout generation." Petersen attributed the generational phenomenon to millennials' upbringings, the economic environment they grew up in, social media, and the anxiety of easy, straightforward tasks, like running errands.

Nearly half of millennials have left a job for mental-health reasons.
That's according to a study conducted by Mind Share Partners, SAP, and Qualtrics and published in the Harvard Business Review. The study, which looked at mental-health challenges and stigmas in the US workplace, polled 1,500 respondents ages 16 and older working full time.

That was significantly higher than the overall percentage of respondents who said they had left a job for mental-health reasons, 20%. This indicates a "generational shift in awareness," the authors of the report, Kelly Greenwood, Vivek Bapat, and Mike Maughan, said.

"Mental health is becoming the next frontier of diversity and inclusion, and employees want their companies to address it," the authors wrote.

read entire unedited article: https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-mental-health-burnout-lonely-depressed-money-stress

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