Between 2014 and 2024, the proportion of people aged 16–24 in England experiencing mental health issues rose from 19% to 26%.

This means over 1.6 million young people – enough to fill Wembley Stadium 18 times over – are affected by mental ill-health today.

Social media is often at the centre of conversations about what’s driving this trend. But while our increasingly digital lives are part of the story, the bigger picture is more complex. Young people are arguably spending more time online partly because the real world has less and less to offer them.

At the heart of their declining wellbeing is the hollowing out of the real-world infrastructure that supports healthy social development, with social lives becoming increasingly fragile and “thinned”.

This “social thinning”, a term we developed in research exploring trauma, includes fewer opportunities to play, take risks and build supportive relationships. This thinning, we believe, has worrying implications for development and mental health.

One of us (Eamon McCrory) is a neuroscientist who has spent years studying risk and resilience and brain systems that develop across adolescence. During this period, the brain refines the systems that........

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