The state of youth mental health: Distress is high, help is hard to reach

Saturday, 18 April 2026

The Youth Health and Wellbeing Survey found one in five Kiwi teens are in psychological distress (picture posed by model).

The latest Youth Health and Wellbeing Survey shows many young New Zealanders remain hopeful and connected. However, a significant minority are struggling without the support they need. Amelia Wade reports.

Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey says children not getting the support they need keeps him awake at night.

Researchers say the findings of the biggest national survey of young people’s health shows too many are struggling without timely help.

The Youth Health and Wellbeing Survey 2025, released by the Ministry of Social Development, captures the voices of about 9400 young people directly rather than through parents or teachers - making it one of the most significant snapshots of youth wellbeing in New Zealand in recent years.

Among those who answered all the questions needed for scoring, 21.2% met the threshold for probable psychological distress on the Kessler-6 screening tool.

One in eight, 13.2%, reported high depressive symptoms on another measure, while 44.4% showed moderate depressive symptoms. A further 31.6% were flagged as being at high risk of eating problems and potentially needing further assessment.

The survey also asked about self-harm and suicidality.

In the previous 12 months, 24.2% of young people said they had deliberately hurt themselves or done something they knew might harm them. Almost one in five, 19%, said they had seriously thought about killing themselves.

About 12.9% had made a suicide plan and 5.7% said they had attempted suicide. Another 31.8% said they had felt that life was not worth living in the past year.

Dr Terry Fleming, an associate professor in population health at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, said the findings meant there was an “awful lot of suffering” and that New Zealand was not setting up its young people for a healthy future.

Fleming said research pointed to some young people finding it hard to imagine a positive future because of worries about climate change and jobs, while devices meant information was constantly at their fingertips.

“My personal view is that it’s not as simple as saying social media time is terrible for everybody, but certainly the increase in youth distress across the English-speaking world has coincided with increased online time and decreased sleep and time with families and time with sport and time with seeing people face to face,” she said.

Barriers to support

The survey also found many young people were struggling to get support.

While 21.2% may have benefited from further mental health assessment, only 6.1% said they had accessed professional mental health support such as a counsellor or psychologist for help or advice when they were feeling bad or having a hard time in the past year.

Young people were much more likely to turn to friends, at 63.6%, or to a known adult or parent, at 55.3%, than to professionals.

The biggest barriers were psychological rather than practical.

Young people most commonly said they hoped the problem would go away by itself, felt too overwhelmed to cope, did not think their problems were bad enough, thought they should work out their own problems or felt too embarrassed.

Those reasons were more common than being unable to get an appointment, transport problems or cost.

That suggests many struggling teenagers are not simply being locked out by services, but are also minimising their own distress, feeling ashamed, or not knowing how to seek help in the first place.

Minister for Mental Health Matt Doocey says children not getting the help they need keeps him awake at night.

Doocey said youth mental health was an issue he was particularly passionate about.

“What keeps me up at night is thinking that there are children out there who aren’t getting the support they need to get through what they may be going through, whether that’s in school, through counselling, or via specialist services.

“I am acutely aware of the impact that being stuck on a wait list for mental health support has on young people and their families. That’s why I have made a commitment that any young person needing support must be able to access it.”

Dr Ella Cullen is Kaiwhakahaere Pūnaha Toiora Arataki | Director of Wellbeing System Leadership at Te Hiringa Mahara | Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission.

Doocey said it was “significant” that 3.7% of respondents said a barrier to support was not being able to get an appointment. But he also said that there were more barriers to break down, including nearly a third saying they didn’t know where to get help and more than 35% saying they were too embarrassed.

He said understanding those barriers was “incredibly important”, which was why he had pushed for them to be included in the survey when he was minister for youth - a portfolio he has since lost.

He pointed to the Top Up campaign, run by Health New Zealand and the Mental Health Foundation, which shows people where to go and how to look after their wellbeing.

“At the end of the day, if a young person is needing support, we want to ensure support is there.”

But Dr Ella Cullen, director of wellbeing at the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission, said there was evidence that while access to specialist mental health and addiction services was improving for other age groups, it was getting worse for young people.

“Young people, basically, they’re feeling worse and there’s higher levels of distress. The system or the services are not really meeting their needs,” she said.

“The specialist services that are there, they’re quite hard to access. But we’ve also heard that young people want options. They want more options that are faster access, like digital options.”

A complex picture

Terry Fleming, associate professor in population health at Victoria University of Wellington.

The report does not present a simple story of young people in crisis because it also found many young people still reported positive wellbeing, belonging and connection.

On the WHO-5 wellbeing measure, 65.6% reported good to excellent wellbeing. About 69% said they were proud of who they are and 66.6% said they felt accepted by others. Most had a friend they could trust and share feelings with, and 90% said they were looked after by someone who loves or cares for them.

The report stresses that it is possible for a young person to feel proud of who they are, have close friends and still be struggling with serious symptoms.

“The experiences of mental distress and mental wellbeing are not mutually exclusive,” it says.

The 2025 report says some of the mental health screening tools were newly applied in this version of the survey and are not currently comparable with previous survey data. That means the findings should largely be treated as a snapshot rather than a definitive trend line.

But Fleming said one measure that could be tracked over time was the WHO-5 wellbeing score, which has been included in previous youth surveys. On that measure, 76% of young people reported good or excellent wellbeing in 2012, 69% in 2019, and 65.6% in the latest survey.

She said she was particularly worried about girls. In this survey, only 55% of girls were reporting good or excellent wellbeing.

“We used to say 80% of young people are well, that is so not true anymore,” she said.

The impact of screens and social media

One of the clearest shifts in teenage life is the sheer amount of time being spent on screens, researchers say.

The survey found 31.3% of young people used screens for three to four hours a day, 26.2% for five to six hours, 21.3% for seven to 10 hours, and 8.5% for 11 hours or more.

That means almost 30% were on screens for at least seven hours a day and more than half were using screens for at least five hours.

Dr Samantha Marsh is a research fellow at the National Institute of Health Innovation.

Social media use was also substantial, with about a third of teenagers spending more than five hours a day on it. The survey found 16.8% used social media for five to six hours a day, 10.6% for seven to 10 hours, and 6.1% for 11 hours or more.

Public health researcher Dr Samantha Marsh, from the University of Auckland, said she was surprised by the findings.

“That is hugely concerning.”

Marsh, who is part of the B416 lobby group pushing for a social media ban for under-16s, said the school phone ban meant teenagers, in theory, should not be accessing social media during the day, so those findings suggested they were spending all that time on social media outside school hours.

She suspected it was displacing healthier activities like sleep, sport, hobbies and time with friends and family.

“They’re spending more free time sitting on a screen, sitting on social media, and probably quite late into the night.”

She said she was worried about the long-term impacts of that because of recent research in the United States which found high social media use worsened adolescents’ cognitive functioning, including memory and attention.

The YHWS asked teenagers why they used social media and found it was used mainly for entertainment, boredom, connection and escape.

Some 77% said they used it to look at content for entertainment, 69.2% to connect with like-minded people, 68.3% because they were bored, and 45% to take their mind off problems or escape.

It also found Māori and Pasifika young people were more likely than the overall student population to be spending very long hours on screens.

Almost 38.1% of Māori students and 45.6% of Pasifika students were using screens for at least seven hours a day, compared with 29.8% overall. For social media specifically, 26.7% of Māori students and 29.6% of Pasifika students were using it for at least seven hours a day, compared with 16.8% overall.

Fleming said the effect of social media depended on what young people were using it for.

If someone had their phone on while sharing music on Spotify with a friend, she would not expect that to be harmful. But endlessly scrolling violent content or self-harm material would be.

Bullying and harm

The survey also reveals the wider context in which young people are living.

More than a quarter, 26.3%, said they had been bullied in the past 12 months. Nearly one in six, 17.2%, said they had not been able to see a doctor, nurse or other healthcare worker when they wanted or needed to in the past year.

The survey also found significant exposure to harm beyond mental distress alone. In the past year, 12.5% reported being touched in a sexual way or made to do sexual things they did not want to do, including sexual abuse or rape.

Nearly half, 49.9%, said they had been yelled or sworn at by an adult in the place they lived, while 7.1% said they had been hit or physically hurt by an adult there.

Rainbow youth

Rainbow young people stood out as one of the groups under the greatest pressure.

The survey estimates 15.2% of respondents were rainbow, using a broad indicator that included sexuality and gender diversity. The overall report already shows poorer outcomes for many vulnerable groups, but the accompanying data tables show just how sharp the disparity is for rainbow students on some key measures.

Only 43.9% of rainbow young people were in the higher wellbeing category on WHO-5, compared with 65.6% overall. About 39.7% had seriously thought about suicide in the past 12 months, compared with 19% overall.

About 11.8% had attempted suicide, compared with 5.7% overall. And 41% said they had been bullied in the previous year, compared with 26.3% overall.

That means rainbow young people are not only reporting worse mental health outcomes, but are also more exposed to the social conditions that can deepen distress: bullying, exclusion and reduced feelings of safety.

The report also suggests schools are not yet getting this right for everyone. Overall, 73.3% of young people said their school or course was supportive of sexually diverse people and 68.9% said it was supportive of gender-diverse people.

That means about one in four did not see their school as supportive of sexually diverse students and about three in 10 did not see it as supportive of gender-diverse students.

That is especially significant in a survey where 66.6% overall said they felt accepted by others, because acceptance is clearly not being experienced evenly across the student population.

Fleming said the findings reflected the environments rainbow and minority young people were living in, rather than anything inherent about them.

“Being gay in a homophobic environment, especially when you are growing up and kind of coming to terms with who you are and how you fit in and possibly before you find your communities, absolutely is a risky time,” she said.