Across continents, youth mortality is rising, not from wars or pandemics, but from mental despair, social neglect, and the invisible battles of the mind. They are born in the era of technology, artificial intelligence, connectivity, and boundless promise, yet many of them are dying in silence. The Global Burden of Disease 2025 report paints a very chilling picture. Among people aged 15–29, deaths from suicide, drug use, and self-harm have exceeded the number of road traffic accidents in several regions.
This is the new epidemic of the century, one that infects not only the body, but the soul. A crisis of the mind in a connected world is a contradiction of retrogression. Never before have young people been so connected, yet so alone. Across African cities and around the world, the whispers are getting louder. Counsellors report the rising cases of student suicides, while churches and mosques are quietly setting up “listening corners” for youths in distress.
This era of social media has offered platforms for expression but also pits self-worth against algorithms and filtered illusions. Loneliness, lack of self-esteem, cyberbullying, and the pressure to “perform happiness” have created what psychologists call “the illusion of belonging.” In most wealthy nations, anxiety and depression are now the leading causes of disability. In the passageways of our hospitals and classrooms, one truth still echoes: the youths are dying because the world is not listening to them enough.
In low and middle-income countries, particularly across Africa and South Asia, these conditions are often undiagnosed, untreated, and even dismissed and tagged as a symptom of either weakness or witchcraft. Most Schools focus on grades, not grief. Healthcare systems mostly prioritise curative care, rather than prevention. Families struggling with economic hardship, often misread distress as rebellion. This neglect bleeds into mortality data such as self-harm, drug abuse, and preventable conditions like anaemia or maternal complications.
In Nigeria, advocacy networks like the Mentally Aware Nigeria Initiative (MANI) and She Writes Woman are reframing mental health as a right, not a luxury, calling for policy integration into primary healthcare, all schools' curriculum, and workplace wellness. Ghana’s Mental Health Authority reforms and Kenya’s 2025 Youth Wellbeing Bill mark a slow but hopeful change. The solutions will not come from psychiatrists alone but also from health care workers, religious leaders, communities, teachers, and parents who are ready to help the youngsters.
Governments should also treat mental health like infrastructure, something to be built, funded, and maintained. Schools should ensure that emotional literacy is as vital as mathematics. Faith institutions, workplaces, and media platforms should amplify hope, not hierarchy. Also, nations should invest in digital mental health tools like teletherapy, helplines, and AI-driven crisis monitoring systems that will bring care through cell phone to the community to help resolve this crisis. In safeguarding their minds, we just might save our collective future.
To heal this generation, we must learn to sit with their pain, not silence it. We should replace judgment with empathy, and remind every young person that their existence is not an accident, but a gift.
✍🏽 William Z. Bozimo
Veteran Journalist | Columnist | National Memory Keeper
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