Rose Bretécher: We’re sold the dream, but fear a nightmare future
For me anxiety is uncertainty – the physical and emotional sensation that something bad might happen, out of my control. Young people feeling at sea is nothing new, but my generation is staring down a peculiar set of unknowns.
The housing market is the mother lode of uncertainty – for most of my contemporaries the idea of buying a house is laughable – but there are more insidious encroachments on our sense of calm. Boundaries between work life and personal life continue to blur as we feel obliged to make ourselves perpetually available, and to self-promote with increasingly hostile social media. When I post an article these days I wince. In public Twitter feeds and forums I’ve been called “unhinged”, “perverted” and “depraved”; I’ve been warned by caring friends not to read the comments; I’ve been asked if I “want a greasy cock ride” (flattered, but spoken for).
I was raised to believe that the NHS was one of the greatest things about our country, and I still believe that, but funding cuts mean I can no longer rely on it. I have a history of anxiety disorders and I’ve developed a stress-induced vocal tic which regularly sees me shouting “whoop” at strangers in the street. I need therapy, but the waiting list at my local London practice is seven to eight months. As my generation grows up, will we be able to get free mental healthcare in times of crisis? If not, will we be able to afford to go private? Many of us don’t know.
Meanwhile, advertisers sell us the millennial dream – an idyll of creative freedom, off-kilter good looks and high-ceilinged apartments. Part of my work is developing commercial content for production companies and advertising agencies. Of the briefs I’ve seen in the last two years I’d say that a good 80% were aimed at millennials. From unfashionably macho brands that want to channel a more inclusive, contemporary masculinity; to car brands that want to move away from traditional life-stage advertising. Some campaigns are progressive and nuanced, many resort to cringeworthy caricature, even fetishisation, of youth: We are “lovers of life”. We “create first, question later”. We “make. inspire. do”. We “crave epic”. Whoop. Our culture is heightening young people’s awareness of millennial ideals – of how we think our lives should be – while simultaneously eroding the resources we need to achieve those dreams.
Anonymous: There’s a lot of pressure to have everything sorted
I can’t remember a time when I haven’t felt some level of anxiety; even as a child I would cry if my parents were late to pick me up – worried that they’d been blown up or in some horrific car accident.
Despite this, it came as a surprise when my anxiety went into overload last year. I’ve felt stressed before, and went through a particularly difficult time in my late teens when a close friend died. But nothing prepared me for the meltdown I experienced around my 27th birthday.
I felt nauseous at the thought of getting a year older and having so little control over my life: I was trapped in a job I had worked hard to get but hated, dealing with stress in my social life, and was desperately missing my boyfriend who had spent the past two years studying abroad. I was miserable and filled with worries about the future. How would I ever progress in my career? Would my relationship soon fall apart? Then, one night, I just stopped sleeping. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop my brain whirring around with thoughts, and the less I slept the more stressed I became. In the midst of my anxiety and depression I felt as though someone had come along and drenched me in water, diluting my personality so that I was no longer myself. I couldn’t eat or sleep and I panicked about everything.
Tackling mental health issues is hard for anyone, but when you’re young – and living in a world dominated by social media – there’s a lot of pressure to have everything sorted. I felt a great deal of shame about how unhappy I felt, especially given the fact that on paper my life was great. I had a job that other people envied, and was living in a big flat in north London with friends. I didn’t want to tell people that while on the outside things looked good, on the inside I felt lost and incredibly lonely. Funnily enough, when I did eventually open up to friends, many said they had the same fears and worries. Suddenly I felt less alone.
My circumstances are probably unusual in that, since counselling, I’ve realised that I have also been suffering with trauma and repressed issues about things that happened in my past. However, this doesn’t detract from the fact that modern life had left me feeling completely bereft. I felt like I was on a treadmill running in a direction I hadn’t chosen, with no chance to think and no way of getting off.
In a world where many young people feel they have no say over anything, no chance of owning their own home, travelling or living like the generations before them, it’s easy to feel like you are boxed in. But you’re not alone, and with a bit of time, thought and reflection, you can remove that box from around you.
Ronnie Joice: I found CBT so patronising
When I first encountered shooting pains in my arms, palpitations and short breaths, I thought I was having a heart attack and rang an ambulance. I sat in one while they stuck things on my chest and took my blood pressure and told me I was fine. But this kept on happening. I had never been a worrier – I’d even survived being in a coma from meningitis a few years before without letting it affect me mentally. Yet every time I had one of these, I was sure they had missed something, and I ended up becoming a serious hypochondriac.
At one point, any small issue would involve me not being able to relax until I’d sought out medical reassurance. I spent a night in a hospital ward next to somebody who had a collapsed lung – a real medical emergency. But it only served as temporary relief, as my mind would just play tricks on me as to what else it could be, something they may have missed. I became hypersensitive to any physical sensation. I convinced myself regularly I was dying, which caused more anxiety through physical manifestations of panic.
My GP, who I was now seeing at least once a week, referred me to CBT but it felt so patronising. The first half of the sessions were spent filling out questionnaires asking you to rate between one and five how suicidal you felt. It didn’t deal with any underlying psychological causes. I eventually managed to overcome that period of my life when I learned to understand the ideology behind CBT, but it took a long time.
Anxiety crippled me for years. You probably wouldn’t have known it, mind. Mental health is still something that is stigmatised and rarely talked about in public. It doesn’t need to be that way. Talk. Listen. Come out and be honest with those who care about you.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett: I wouldn’t struggle as much with a stable base
It’s important to distinguish between Anxiety with a capital “A” and simple anxiety, the first being a mental health problem and the second being a proportional response to the stressful events of everyday life. I reckon I have both and, for many people, they tend to feed into one another.
I definitely wouldn’t struggle psychologically as much as I do if, for example, I felt like I had a stable base. I wouldn’t say that being on a month-by-month rolling tenancy keeps me up at night, but it’s there at the back of my mind. When things are tough, knowing you could be homeless with four weeks’ notice isn’t great, and the year-long leak we had in my bedroom ceiling definitely contributed to feelings of low mood – how could it not?
While I’m conscious of the media stories about how an “anxiety epidemic” is sweeping Generation Y, I tend to see it as a symptom of that instability – not just when it comes to rental properties but also our jobs, which are frequently low paid or founded on unreliable zero-hours or freelance contracts. In addition, social inequalities can seem more stark when your friends’ rich parents are buying them a flat but you’re saddled with £36,000 of university debt and rising rents (and you can’t afford £50 a session for the therapy you need, but the NHS waiting list is too long). I really sympathise with those young people who are leaving home now and facing these worries in an increasingly unfriendly wider world.
I am grateful for the small amount of stability I do have, but I grew up skint and as a result will probably always worry about ending up skint again. Saying that, it means that not being overdrawn feels like the height of success. My own house is a pipe dream, but I know that while the stability it would provide might not solve all my problems, it would certainly make things less stressful on a day-to-day basis.