For decades, the question scrutinizing education was whether schools were preparing young people for the future. Today, perhaps the real question is whether the future we present to them is still “psychologically habitable.” Mental health is no longer a footnote in education. It has become its most demanding test.
For decades, we questioned whether schools were preparing young people for the future. Are we preparing them for employment? For citizenship? For technology? For global competition? Today, perhaps the right questions are different: What kind of future are we presenting to them? And is that future still psychologically habitable?
Young people’s mental health is no longer a secondary issue reserved for counseling offices or difficult family conversations. It has become a central educational issue. The World Health Organization estimates that, globally, one in every seven young people between the ages of 10 and 19 lives with a mental disorder. Depression, anxiety, and behavioral disorders are among the leading causes of illness and disability at this age. In a report published last month on the mental health of children, adolescents, and young people, the OECD confirmed that among 15-year-olds, the percentage reporting at least two health complaints more than once a week rose from 37% in 2014 to 52% in 2022. Those who reported feeling “low” more than once a week increased from 20.5% to 32.5%. The causes are multiple. Social media, academic pressure, economic insecurity, bullying, climate anxiety, global instability, and family vulnerabilities intersect within an ecosystem of distress. It is therefore important to resist simplistic explanations. It is not just the smartphone, the pandemic, or school pressure.
There is one dimension we rarely name with the necessary courage: the example set by adults. We ask young people for calm while offering them a public sphere that is increasingly inflamed. We speak to them about citizenship, yet normalize aggression as a method. We teach cooperation, while collective life increasingly unfolds as a succession of trenches. Us against them, winners against losers, the outraged against enemies.
Young people observe and absorb everything. They observe political language, verbal violence on social media, the ease with which people who think differently are humiliated, and the transformation of nearly every disagreement into a moral battle. They observe adults who demand mental health support in schools while validating, through their public and private decisions, environments of permanent hostility. They observe us when we say we want dialogue and then reward whoever shouts the loudest.
We should not dramatize this point in simplistic ways. Polarization alone does not explain the youth mental health crisis. But it is difficult to imagine a generation growing up with confidence when the adult world presents the future as a threat, opponents as enemies, and difference as danger. Recent research on affective polarization has highlighted its effects on social cohesion and well-being. International trust barometers also reveal worrying signs of a culture of grievance, institutional distrust, and zero-sum logic, in which what another person gains is perceived as something I lose.
It is in this context that schools become even more important. Not because they can single handedly solve what adult society itself has disorganized. It would be unfair to expect schools to compensate for job insecurity, the housing crisis, digital loneliness, verbal violence, geopolitical instability, or a lack of hope. But schools can become one of the few places where people concretely learn that disagreement is not destruction, demanding excellence is not humiliation, and belonging does not require thinking the same way.
The temptation will be to respond to this problem with more specialized services. These are necessary. It would be irresponsible to downplay the importance of psychologists, psychiatrists, multidisciplinary teams, and accessible clinical support. However, schools cannot become hospitals. Teachers are not therapists. But schools can choose whether to be therapeutic or to become an aggravating circumstance through the way they welcome, challenge, listen, compare, punish, protect, or abandon students.
Mental health is not simply the absence of illness. It is also belonging, safety, meaning, relationships, and hope. PISA 2022 showed that students who feel safe at school and are not exposed to bullying or risk factors tend to demonstrate a stronger sense of belonging, greater life satisfaction, more confidence in autonomous learning, and lower anxiety. The school environment is an educational variable, not merely background scenery.
This leads to the conclusion that the next major educational reform may not be curricular, technological, or administrative. It may be relational. We need schools and universities capable of teaching knowledge without humiliating, demanding excellence without crushing, and evaluating without reducing individuals to results. We need educational communities in which excellence is not confused with exhaustion, nor autonomy with abandonment.
And this does not mean lowering expectations. A school that protects mental health is not a school without rigor or ambition. It is a school that understands that learning requires trust and that trust requires connection. The opposite of high expectations is not care. It is indifference. And caring does not mean making everything easier. It means creating the conditions for each young person to face difficulty without feeling alone within it.
This is where social innovation becomes decisive. It is not enough to add an app, a hotline, or an annual lecture. Systemic change is required. Teachers must be trained in emotional literacy. Psychologists must be integrated into institutional life. Peers must be empowered to recognize warning signs. Families must be involved without guilt or moralism. Municipalities must be prepared for transitions, and universities must be equipped to support the moments when so many young people leave home, move to new cities, and lose their proximity networks. There are encouraging signs. In Portugal, the Directorate General for Education frames mental health and violence prevention within the scope of the Support Program for Health Promotion and Education. The new Health Education Framework, approved in 2025, presents itself as a flexible tool from preschool through secondary education, focused on the holistic development of children and young people. The challenge now is to move from intention to culture.
Ultimately, the youth mental health crisis is a mirror. It shows us that perhaps we demanded more performance than we offered meaning. Too much connectivity and too little presence. Too much preparation for the future and too little security in the present. No school alone will solve job insecurity, housing problems, digital loneliness, or global uncertainty. But schools can become one of the places where people relearn how to breathe.
For a long time, we believed that preparing young people for the future meant giving them skills. We still need those skills. But perhaps the primary educational duty of our time is to make the future feel like a promise again, rather than merely a threat. That depends not only on schools. It depends on the language we use, the decisions we make, the examples we set, and the courage with which we refuse to transform shared life into a battlefield. If we want young people to become free, creative, and responsible, it is not enough to hand them tools. We must offer them trust, belonging, and a sense of horizon. The generation growing up today does not simply need us to prepare them to survive the world they will inherit. They need us to begin, now, building alongside them a world worth inhabiting.
Frederico Fezas Vital, Executive Diretor at CATÓLICA-LISBON Yunus Social Innovation Center