The Prince’s Trust have said that one in ten young people often feel too anxious to leave the house in a report that highlights the extent to which mental health issues are affecting the population.
Anxiety can be an overwhelming condition, making people unable to deal effectively with everyday life, and preventing them from living their lives to the fullest. For people who have never experienced it, anxiety can be hard to understand. When people become overburdened with fears about things which don’t seem that frightening, it can seem almost ‘silly’ and hard to understand why the person can’t just get over it.
In an interview with the BBC, one young man who has suffered with anxiety for years explained: “Something like going to a club with friends is such an easy and enjoyable experience for most young people but I start to freak out.
“I’m always thinking of what could go wrong, how people are perceiving me, what I look like to them, how they’re going to remember me.
“I want to do all those things but something in the back of my mind can make this not possible.”
Anxiety can cause anything from a mild feeling of fear to severe breathing difficulties and can have a huge impact on people’s lives, sometimes coming to define their lives. The Prince’s Trust discovered the proportion was so large in young people via the Macquarie Youth Index, which surveyed 2,265 16-25 year olds.
It also found that those who were unemployed were more than twice as likely to suffer the effects of anxiety.
With jobs still nowhere near readily available for people, and with young people in a lot of cases being unable to grow up, being stuck living with parents or unable to get a job, it is no surprise that there is such a massive, secret problem affecting so many people.
Unfortunately the mental health care of the country is still not up to scratch to the point where it is capable of tackling these issues on a national scale.
