Midlife Happiness Hump Vanishes as Youth Mental Health Worsens

A growing body of research suggests the familiar midlife "unhappiness hump"—a rise in distress around middle age before wellbeing improves in later life—has vanished because young people are far less mentally healthy than previous generations. Researchers from Dartmouth College, University College London and other institutions reported in PLOS One this month that across multiple large datasets the age profile of illbeing now falls steadily with age rather than peaking in midlife. The change appears worldwide but is driven by worsening mental health among people in their teens and twenties, the authors said.

The team reached the conclusion after analyzing repeat cross‑sectional surveys from the United States and United Kingdom and pooling nearly two million responses from a global mental health project. U.S. data included more than 10 million adults surveyed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 1993 and 2024; U.K. analyses drew on the Household Longitudinal Study covering 2009 to 2023. The international sample came from the Global Minds study, which collected responses in 44 countries from 2020 through 2025. Across these sources, researchers found illbeing...