The Turning Point in Youth Happiness and Mental Health Across 75 Countries

For a decade the evidence on young people's mental health pointed one way. Symptoms of depression and anxiety rose from the early 2010s, most steeply among girls, and life satisfaction fell. In 2025 and 2026 several surveys reported the first improvements. This study asks whether the decline has turned, where, when, in which measures, and whether the turn came before or after the wave of school phone bans and social media age limits that governments adopted from 2023 onward. We harmonized 1,129 annual and wave series (12,223 data points) from 14 sources covering 155 countries into one database, and followed 572 series that reach 2023 or later in 93 countries. Each series received a joinpoint trend with up to two breaks, a wild-bootstrap interval for its turning year, and a test of whether its latest value lies below its peak by more than sampling error plus unexplained year-to-year variation. We sort series into three clocks by how the data are generated: experience (what young people report), care (what services record) and mortality (suicide deaths). The clocks disagree. Of 263 experience series that rose, 208 (79%) have turned and 20 (8%) are still rising; the median turning year is 2022. In PISA, the life satisfaction of 15-year-olds rose between 2022 and 2025 in 65 of 66 countries and economies, by 0.45 points on a 0 to 10 scale (60 increases significant). Girls gained 0.65 points and boys 0.21; girls gained more than boys in all 55 countries with data by sex, and the gap between boys and girls shrank from 0.72 to 0.29 points. Across 31 countries observed in all four waves, girls' life satisfaction went from 7.16 (2015) to 6.41 (2022) to 7.06 (2025). In the United States, persistent sadness among high school girls fell from 56.6% in 2021 to 43.4% in 2025, and major depressive episodes among girls aged 12 to 17 from 29.8% in 2021 to 21.8% in 2024. The care clock did not follow: of 35 care series that rose, 13 (37%) turned and 14 (40%) are still rising. Antidepressant users among Swedish girls aged 15 to 19 went from 36.9 per 1,000 in 2010 to 2013 to 104.6 in 2025, and ADHD stimulant users from 17.6 to 92.3. The mortality clock is the slowest: 28 of 77 youth suicide series that rose (36%) have turned, and the median suicide rate of women aged 15 to 24 across 102 countries rose from 2.50 per 100,000 in 2010 to 2014 to 3.24 in 2019 to 2023. Of 16 national series that turned in countries with a national or first state-level school phone measure, 15 turned before the measure applied and one, in the Netherlands, in the year it applied. In PISA, life satisfaction rose by 0.44 points in six countries that introduced a national school phone measure between the 2022 and 2025 waves and by 0.40 points in ten countries that had none (difference 0.05, permutation p = 0.56). Youth is no longer the happiest age everywhere. In Canada, 95.9% of adults aged 18 to 34 were satisfied with life in 2015 against 89.7% of those aged 65 and over; in 2025 the figures were 82.0% and 88.2%, and the young have been below the old since 2022. In six US states that asked both periods, dissatisfaction with life among 18- to 24-year-olds rose from 5.5% (2013 to 2017) to 9.2% (2022 to 2024). The young now report lower life satisfaction than people aged 50 and over in 12 of 36 OECD countries, all English-speaking, Nordic or western European apart from Japan, while in eastern and southern Europe they remain happier by 0.6 to 1.5 points. We call this pattern the Three-Clock Model: a crisis that ends in what young people report years before it ends in what services record and what death registers count. The model makes six testable predictions for 2026 to 2028. Conclusions hold when the window starts in 2012 (97% agreement), with a single joinpoint (98%) and after re-weighting PISA 2025 for item non-response (mean rise 0.450 instead of 0.452).