Young People Told Us What's Breaking Their Mental Health. It's Time to Listen.

Voyage Youth partnered with the University of Bristol on MOSAIC — a new national study that asked young people directly what's harming their wellbeing. What they said should change everything.

More than a quarter of young people aged 16-24 in England now have a diagnosed mental health condition. That's up from fewer than one in five just a decade ago. The question isn't whether there's a crisis — it's why we keep treating the symptoms while ignoring the causes.

The MOSAIC project, funded by the Wellcome Trust and led by Dr Laura Tinner at the University of Bristol, set out to do something deceptively simple: ask young people themselves. In summer 2025, 39 young people aged 16-25 gathered in London, Bradford and Glasgow for creative workshops exploring how their lives, identities and circumstances shape their mental health. Voyage Youth supported the London workshops, recruiting young men whose voices are too rarely centred in research like this.

What came out of those rooms was honest, urgent, and — for those of us who work with young people every day — entirely unsurprising.

Belonging is everything

Again and again, across all three cities, young people came back to the same word: belonging. Feeling accepted — at school, at work, in their neighbourhood, in their own community — was described as fundamental to their wellbeing. And for many of the young people in this study, belonging was something they had to fight for.

Young people navigating multiple identities — caught between cultural expectations at home and social pressures among peers, or attending schools where their ethnicity, religion or immigration status set them apart — described the mental toll of not knowing where they stood. Being pulled in two directions, judged on both sides, and finding no space where they could simply be themselves.

For young people without the financial means to keep up with their peers, that exclusion had an economic dimension too. Poverty doesn't just limit what you can buy — it limits where you feel you belong.

Where you live shapes who you become

Place matters. The London participants spoke about gang culture, stop and search, and the anxiety of moving through certain streets. Young men described feeling that their area defined how others saw them before they'd even opened their mouth. Young Muslim women spoke of constantly calculating their level of safety in public spaces.

In Bradford, young people talked about leaving the city to access services, and the stigma of simply being from Bradford — the assumption of who you must be before anyone had met you. In Glasgow, participants described rural areas where conservative gender norms made it hard to be yourself, and where services were sparse.

And across all three sites, young people pointed to something that youth workers already know but funders often overlook: safe spaces with trusted adults are not a nice-to-have. They are a lifeline. Youth clubs, community organisations, places where young people can eat, learn, be off the streets and be known — these are infrastructure. The kind that prevents harm before it happens.

Community gives and takes

Community was described as both a shelter and a source of pressure. The connection, solidarity and shared identity that community offers — particularly for young people from racially minoritised backgrounds — was seen as genuinely protective. But community also carries expectations: about careers, education, gender roles, how to dress, who to be.

Young men across the workshops spoke about the stigma of struggling emotionally — the expectation to be strong, to suppress, to get on with it. One participant from London put it directly: men kill themselves at higher rates because they cannot access the emotional support systems that women more readily share with each other.

Young women, particularly in Bradford and Glasgow, described a different kind of pressure — carrying both family expectation and cultural duty, often at the same time as managing their education and, in many cases, caring for younger siblings.

Money is a mental health issue

Financial insecurity ran through every conversation. Not having money meant not being able to get the bus to a doctor's appointment, not being able to join in with friends, not being able to buy the things that made you feel like you belonged. Young people were clear-eyed about employment discrimination too — being Black, being from Bradford, having a disability, being a woman — all of these shaped their sense of what was possible and how hopeful they felt about their futures.

One participant from London described how Black families give their children White-sounding names to improve their chances of getting a job interview. That is not an individual coping strategy. That is evidence of systemic racism, and it belongs in any serious conversation about young people's mental health.

Social media: inescapable and exhausting

Young people didn't just talk about comparison and beauty standards — though those featured. They talked about being unable to switch off from global atrocities. Wars, genocides, famines — arriving on their phones in an endless scroll, with no off switch and no sense that anyone in power was doing anything about it. That feeling of helplessness, of witnessing horror while politicians look away, was named directly as a source of anxiety and despair.

As one young woman in Glasgow put it: the feeling of helplessness when those who are supposed to represent you aren't doing anything — that impacts mental health quite a lot.

The weight of growing up too fast

Many of the young people in this study were already functioning as adults — caring for siblings, managing households, navigating adult responsibilities — while still being treated as children in the systems that were supposed to support them. For young Black men in particular, our London collaborators noted the adultification they experience: being treated as threats rather than young people still finding their way, with all the anxiety and distrust that creates.

The expectation to have it together — to know about careers, money, housing, identity — while still being 17 or 18, was described by multiple participants as deeply stressful. Society had changed. The expectations hadn't.

What needs to change

The MOSAIC report is clear on what it's asking for. Mental health services need to collect and publish data broken down by race, gender, disability and deprivation — and act on what they find. Youth spaces need long-term, ring-fenced funding with outcomes measured against belonging and safety, not just throughput. Young people need to be treated as partners in safety policy, not as threats to be managed. Financial security — transport, employment support, welfare — needs to be treated as a public mental health priority. And employers receiving public money need to be held accountable for discriminatory recruitment.

None of this is radical. All of it is evidence-based. And all of it was asked for, in their own words, by young people in London, Bradford and Glasgow who gave their time to be heard.

Voyage Youth and the work ahead

Voyage Youth is proud to have been part of this research. The young men who came through our doors and sat in those workshops gave researchers something honest and important. They are part of a growing body of evidence that prevention works — and that the communities doing that prevention work deserve to be properly resourced and properly heard.

The MOSAIC project continues. The next phase will map these inequalities statistically across three major UK birth cohort studies. But the message from this first phase is already clear enough to act on.

Young people know what's harming them. The question is whether the people making decisions are willing to listen.

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