Anxiety

Why Anxiety and Depression Are Rising Among Young Australians (and What Helps)

If you’re in your late teens or twenties and it feels like anxiety and low mood are just more common than they used to be, you’re not imagining it. The data backs this up, and it’s worth understanding why, because it changes how we think about getting support early rather than waiting until things feel unmanageable.

A generation under more pressure

According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s Australia’s Health 2026 report, the proportion of 16–24 year olds experiencing a mental disorder in the previous 12 months rose from 26% in 2007 to 39% in 2020–22 — a jump of 13 percentage points in roughly a decade and a half. Across all ages, around one in five Australians aged 16–85 experienced a mental disorder in the past year, with rates notably higher among women (25%) than men (18%).

Mental health and substance use disorders are now the leading cause of non-fatal disease burden in Australia, accounting for 26% of it. Service use is climbing alongside prevalence: in 2024–25, around one in ten Australians (2.8 million people) accessed Medicare-subsidised mental health services, with 18–34 year olds using these services at the highest rate of any age group, and women accessing them at close to double the rate of men. Dispensing of antidepressant medication has also risen, from 120 to 139 people per 1,000 population between 2015–16 and 2024–25.

Why it’s happening now

There’s no single cause, but a few pressures come up consistently in the research and commentary around these figures: the cost of housing and everyday living, a workforce and study environment that feels less secure than it once did, weakening social connection, and the layered effects of social media on comparison, sleep and attention. None of these are things a young person can simply think their way out of — they’re structural pressures sitting alongside whatever else is going on for someone individually.

Why early support matters so much

One of the most well-established findings in mental health research is how early these conditions tend to start. In the landmark U.S. National Comorbidity Survey Replication, Kessler and colleagues found that three-quarters of people who go on to develop a mental disorder in their lifetime will have had their first onset by age 24. That means the window between ages 16 and 24 isn’t just when a lot of distress happens to be showing up — it’s genuinely the period when most mental health conditions first take hold.

That’s the argument for treating early support seriously rather than as something to put off. Anxiety and depression that go unaddressed in young adulthood don’t tend to just resolve on their own; they’re far more workable early, before patterns of avoidance, isolation or self-criticism become entrenched.

What actually helps

Individual counselling gives young adults a structured, confidential space to work through what’s going on — whether that’s generalised anxiety, low mood, panic, or the kind of background stress that’s hard to name but impossible to ignore. Approaches like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and cognitive behavioural strategies are well-supported for both anxiety and depression, and counselling can also simply be a place to be heard without judgement while working out what support actually fits.

If you’re a young adult on the Sunshine Coast, or anywhere else in Australia or New Zealand, noticing that anxiety or low mood has been building for a while, it’s worth reaching out sooner rather than later. At Sunny Coast Counselling, we offer individual counselling in person, via Zoom, and over the phone.

If you’d like to book a counselling session, click here.

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