Women’s mental health has been suffering because of unrealistic ideals portrayed on social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.
“For boys… things like gaming, and certainly pornography and things like that, is a more prevalent factor,” Mr Stride told the Work and Pensions select committee.
A 2023 study published in the US Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease found that “stressful experiences, anxiety, and depression are strongly related to pornography consumption”.
Links with gaming are less clear, with a 2022 Oxford study finding that video games only harmed mental health if people struggled to stop.
Mr Stride said 16 to 24 year-olds had seen “a very marked increase in mental health [conditions], which is very worrying not least because they are young people with futures ahead of them”.
While he said lockdowns were a clear factor, he suggested social media and technology played an even bigger role.
Mr Stride said: “I do think probably as a society we haven’t explored and fully opened up exactly what this technology means for young people’s mental health because I think the impacts are actually very profound and probably an area where there needs to be more research.”
The new ONS figures showed that young men were behind the continued rise in worklessness. There were 99,000 extra 16-to-24 year old men out of work by the end of March, whereas the number of women of the same age classed as NEET fell by 11,000.
Around one in seven young men are now considered NEET, according to the ONS, compared to one in ten young women.
Britain is grappling with one of the worst sickness crises on record, with more than 2.8m people of working age not in the workforce due to ill health, including mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression. This is up from around 2m before Covid.
There are 9.4 million people of working age overall who are neither in work nor looking for a job in the UK, representing a decade high.
Mr Stride has unveiled a series of reforms to tackle Britain’s worklessness crisis, including an overhaul of Britain’s benefits system, warning that the approach to mental health and welfare is in danger of having “gone too far”.
Robert Johnson is a UK-based business writer specializing in finance and entrepreneurship. With an eye for market trends and a keen interest in the corporate world, he offers readers valuable insights into business developments.
