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Dozens of leading international scholars, physicians, advocates, experts, and policymakers from around the world—including six former surgeons general of the United States—will be on campus Oct. 26-28 to discuss why the mental health of young people is in decline worldwide, and what can be done to turn the trend around.

The three-day symposium, A Global Turning Point: Why Youth Well-Being Is in Crisis—and What We Must Do About It—is being co-hosted by ���㽶��Ƶ and the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report Office. 

The symposium is open to the public, and members of the ���㽶��Ƶ community, including faculty, students, staff, and alumni, are encouraged to attend. for in-person events—many of which will be held in the . A livestream will be available beginning Oct. 27 at 8 a.m. EST. 

“This is a big deal,” says economist , the Bruce V. Rauner 1978 Professor at ���㽶��Ƶ and an expert on the economics of happiness, who helped organize the symposium. “The world is coming to ���㽶��Ƶ.”

Attendees are expected to hail from around the globe, including Bangladesh, Brazil, the European Union, India, Iraq, Jordan, Mauritania, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere. 

Some of the key presenters include: 

• Generation Me and The Narcissism Epidemic author Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University
• The Anxious Generation and The Coddling of the American Mind author Jonathan Haidt, a professor of social psychology at New York University’s Stern School of Business
• Pedro Conceição, director of the UNDP’s Human Development Reports Office
• Making Democracy Work and Bowling Alone author Robert Putnam, a professor emeritus at the Harvard’s Kennedy School
• Well-Being and Growth in Advanced Economies and On the Foundations of Happiness in Economics author Maurizio Pugno, a professor of economics at the University of Cassino, Italy

The symposium will explore the implications of a troubling shift in the reported well-being of young people and seek to set a collective agenda to address the problem, says Blanchflower, who for more than two decades and in dozens of papers has tracked patterns in how people experience well-being throughout their lives. 

Until recently, he says, that pattern was shaped like the letter U, with most people reporting the most happiness early in life and again in old age. But beginning about a decade ago, the familiar U-shaped pattern began to show a stark change, with young people increasingly reporting higher degrees of unhappiness. 

The scale of the problem is enormous—on the order of a billion children and young adults, Blanchflower says. “That’s basically the number of 12- to 25-year-olds in the world, and we don’t think any of them are immune to this.” 

He and many of his colleagues believe smartphones, which first became popular in the early 2010s, around the time the declines in youth well-being began to appear, may be a prime driver of the phenomenon. 

The UNDP commissioned Blanchflower to study these trends among young people throughout the world. In the past year, he has authored or co-authored more than a dozen papers analyzing data from the United Kingdom, Africa, the former Soviet Union, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and elsewhere, including that looks at the reported well-being and ill-being of young people in 22 countries.

When , a cognitive scientist known for her groundbreaking work on the psychology of performance, announced at her inauguration that the promotion of mental health would be a top institutional priority for ���㽶��Ƶ, Blanchflower says, the idea of hosting a global symposium with the UNDP was born.

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Economics professor David Blanchflower has tracked patterns in how people experience well-being throughout their lives. (Photo by Katie Lenhart)

“It really builds on President Beilock’s agenda,” Blanchflower says. That agenda has, to date, launched the strategic plan for student mental health and well-being; named ���㽶��Ƶ’s first chief health and wellness officer and first senior vice president for community and campus life; and committed $500 million to strengthening the campus community by creating new and renewed housing for students, faculty, and staff, pledging to create at least 1,000 new beds in the next 10 years. Last week, ���㽶��Ƶ launched Evergreen, a first-of-its-kind AI-powered chatbot that provides students personalized guidance and support to bolster their well-being. 

In 2023, ���㽶��Ƶ hosted a history-making panel on the U.S. mental health crisis featuring then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and seven of his predecessors. Six of these distinguished panelists—including Murthy, Jerome Adams, Richard Carmona, Joycelyn Elders, Antonia Coello Novello, and David Satcher—will be returning to campus for the UNDP symposium, .

“This is going to be one of the most exciting intellectual events at ���㽶��Ƶ this year,” says Richard S. Braddock 1963 Professor in Economics . “Anybody who is worried about their own children or worried about young people is going to be interested in this.”

The symposium begins on Sunday, Oct. 26, with a showcase of ���㽶��Ƶ-grown initiatives to support student mental health and wellness. To launch the day, participants are invited to engage in a in the outdoors. Options include hikes up nearby Holt’s Ledge in Lyme, N.H.; Gile Mountain in Norwich, Vt., or Balch Hill in Hanover, as well as a guided “forest-bathing” walk through Pine Park and kayaking and canoeing on the Connecticut River.

Sacerdote, who has helped organize this section of the symposium, says the outdoor activities are inspired in part by Peak Bag, an annual event created by ���㽶��Ƶ alumni to raise awareness of mental health and suicide prevention. 

Sacerdote chairs ���㽶��Ƶ’s Outdoor Engagement Committee, which is helping to make outdoor activities such as skiing and paddling more accessible to students through free classes and free gear rentals. In addition, he and his students—in collaboration with students in the —recently launched , an online repository of outdoor activities on and around campus.

“There’s growing evidence that face-to-face activity with peers, without phones, in the outdoors is very helpful. And even a few hours a week can make a really big difference in people’s mental health, particularly if there’s sunshine involved,” says Sacerdote. “���㽶��Ƶ is making a big push in general on student mental health, and one branch of that is a big push on outdoor engagement.”

Returning indoors, Beilock will moderate an afternoon panel with ���㽶��Ƶ faculty and alumni on how ���㽶��Ƶ cultivates well-being and community through tangible engagement with the natural world. Senior Vice President for Community and Campus Life will moderate a subsequent panel on whole-student well-being with faculty and staff from the School of Arts and Sciences, Geisel School of Medicine, and the Hopkins Center for the Arts.

On Monday, Oct. 27, the theme will be “Revealing the Crisis: Evidence, Engagement, and the Decline in Youth Well-Being.” The day’s events will open with the panel discussion with the six former surgeons general, moderated by Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Then Blanchflower will set the scene with a lecture on the changing pattern of youth well-being.

Also on Monday, Twenge and Haidt will deliver addresses on “The Challenge Before Us: Declines in Youth Mental Health Around the Globe” and “The Anxious Generation,” respectively, and a series of panels will discuss the collapse of youth mental health, the problem of loneliness, and the issue of declining test scores. 

Finally, on Tuesday, Oct. 28, the symposium will explore “From Insight to Action: A Global Agenda for Youth Well-Being.” Events include addresses from Conceição and Alex Bryson, a professor of quantitative social science at University College London, and panels exploring a variety of potential solutions, from AI technologies to public policy. 

“The idea is to try and come out with a set of ���㽶��Ƶ-UN principles” to establish a way forward, Blanchflower says. “Maybe in two years we’ll do it again to learn from what we’ve done.”

A full schedule of events is available at the symposium website.