Despite widespread access to therapy, mental health outcomes among young adults are growing worse.
Therapy apps are booming, mental health awareness is trending, and Gen Z is more open than any previous generation about getting help. So why does it still feel like so many young people are emotionally unraveling?
Despite all the tools, resources, and encouragement to seek support, youth anxiety, depression, and burnout are at record highs. In a time when mental health is a major talking point, something clearly isn’t working the way we hoped. Is the therapy itself failing? Or is the problem much bigger than what a once-a-week session can fix?
From systemic issues to cultural shifts, there’s a growing disconnect between emotional support and actual healing. The question isn’t whether young people are getting help—it’s whether the help is enough in a world that feels increasingly unmanageable.
1. Therapy can’t compete with a broken society.
You can’t out-talk your way out of skyrocketing rent, climate collapse, political chaos, and constant mass shootings. Today’s young people are navigating a world where the threats are real and everywhere—and no amount of CBT or mindfulness apps can erase that reality.
Therapy may help manage reactions, but it doesn’t eliminate the structural stressors driving the despair. This mismatch leaves many feeling like they’re the problem, when the world itself is gaslighting them into numbness or rage. It’s not that therapy is useless—it just isn’t built to address collapsing systems.
If we don’t pair emotional support with systemic reform, we’re asking young people to adapt to a world that’s actively harming them. That’s not resilience—it’s resignation.
2. Social media is fueling comparison, not connection.
Therapy encourages self-awareness and authenticity—but social media pressures everyone to perform a curated version of both. Young people are constantly comparing their real, messy lives to someone else’s highlight reel.
Even accounts about mental health can become overwhelming, turning wellness into yet another competition. You can leave a therapy session feeling seen, then open your phone and spiral back into insecurity. The dopamine highs of likes and the lows of judgment happen too fast for therapeutic tools to keep up.
Online life creates a loop of never feeling enough, even when you’re doing the work. The result? Progress in therapy often stalls when it’s undermined by constant digital distortion of what healing should look like.
3. Overdiagnosis and self-labeling are blurring the lines.
Thanks to TikTok and mental health awareness campaigns, diagnosis language is everywhere. While that can reduce stigma, it also means a flood of self-diagnosis that may not be accurate or helpful.
Young people are identifying as “anxious,” “borderline,” or “neurodivergent” without professional guidance—sometimes based on 30-second videos. While labels can provide clarity, they can also become identities that limit growth or fuel hopelessness. Worse, therapy may focus on managing a self-diagnosed condition that isn’t the actual root of the problem.
In a culture that prizes instant answers and neat categories, we risk simplifying deeply complex emotional experiences. Therapy can get derailed when clients cling more to the label than the underlying healing process.
4. Mental health care is still deeply inaccessible.
Therapy might be booming, but it’s not booming equally. For many young people, especially those from marginalized communities, therapy is either unaffordable, unavailable, or delivered by someone who doesn’t understand their lived experience.
Waitlists for public services can stretch for months, and app-based options often lack depth or continuity. Even when young people do access therapy, they may face language barriers, cultural disconnects, or therapists who aren’t trained in trauma-informed or LGBTQ+ affirming care.
The gap between needing help and getting it remains wide—and exhausting. Until therapy is accessible, diverse, and affordable for all, it will remain a lifeline that too many can’t reach or don’t trust.
5. One hour a week can’t contain a tidal wave of distress.
Talk therapy often happens once a week for 50 minutes. But what about the other 10,000 minutes of the week when your anxiety spikes, your panic sets in, or your depressive fog won’t lift? Young people are facing relentless stress from school, work, relationships, and the planet itself.
A weekly check-in—especially when it’s limited by insurance or therapist availability—feels like a drop in the bucket. Without wraparound support, community care, or crisis intervention, therapy can feel like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.
Young people may start therapy with hope but end up feeling abandoned when their pain keeps spilling over outside the scheduled hour.
6. The pressure to “heal” can create even more stress.
We’ve made mental health a priority, but we’ve also turned it into a performance. Young people are bombarded with messages about “doing the work,” “healing your inner child,” and “manifesting wellness.”
While these ideas can be empowering, they can also create intense pressure to always be progressing, always be okay. Therapy becomes another achievement to strive for rather than a process to move through. When healing doesn’t happen fast—or looks messy—young people feel like they’re failing.
This toxic positivity masks the real, nonlinear nature of emotional growth. It’s okay not to be okay, but the current culture sometimes makes it feel like you’re only valuable if you’re healed and thriving.
7. Therapists are burned out and stretched thin.
The therapist shortage is real, and it’s getting worse. Even as demand for mental health care rises, many providers are leaving the profession due to burnout, low pay, and overwhelming caseloads. Those who remain may not have the time or energy to fully support each client.
For young people who need consistency and trust, this churn can be devastating. Switching therapists mid-process, facing long gaps between sessions, or getting generic, rushed care all contribute to disillusionment.
Therapy may still be booming on paper, but behind the scenes, many professionals are barely hanging on. That fragility makes it harder for young clients to form lasting, effective therapeutic relationships.
8. Trauma is more common—and more complex—than ever.
Young people are growing up amid collective trauma: a pandemic, school shootings, climate anxiety, economic instability, and racial injustice. Many also carry personal traumas that traditional therapy models don’t always account for.
While the language of trauma is more common, not all therapists are trained to address it properly. Some focus on symptom management rather than root healing. Others unintentionally retraumatize clients with invalidation or poor boundaries.
For therapy to work in this generation, it must evolve to meet the deep and layered pain many young people carry. Without that evolution, therapy can feel shallow—and even unsafe—for those who need it most.
9. Healing requires community, not just clinicians.
The rise of individual therapy has led us to believe that healing happens one-on-one, in a room with a licensed expert. But humans are social creatures, and community care is often the missing link in mental health.
Young people may be in therapy but still feel completely isolated in their daily lives. Without supportive friendships, family connections, or mutual aid networks, progress in therapy can stall. Healing needs to happen both inside and outside the therapy room.
That means group support, peer-led spaces, and cultural models of collective care. Until our systems prioritize communal healing, many young people will feel like they’re healing alone—and that loneliness can undo the very work therapy aims to do.
10. Therapy isn’t broken—but our expectations might be.
Therapy isn’t a magic fix. It’s one tool in a much larger toolbox. Expecting it to carry the weight of a crumbling world, personal trauma, and systemic injustice is unfair—to therapy and to those who seek it.
For young people, the real answer might be a combination of therapy, community, activism, spirituality, and creative expression. But in a society that still stigmatizes emotion, therapy is often the only sanctioned outlet.
That’s too much pressure on one system—and it leaves too many people disappointed or disillusioned when it doesn’t deliver total transformation. Therapy still matters. But it can’t carry the burden of everything falling apart.