The famous “Hump Dissignined” has disappeared and young people pay the price

Once a universal characteristic of human psychology, the “bump of misfortune” in the forties has disappeared, replaced by a new trend: mental health is the worst of young people and improves with age.

Data from the United States, the United Kingdom and dozens of countries suggest that today’s young people lead this change, faced with deeper difficulties than previous generations.

A new study calls into question the bump of the misfortune of the forties

A great new study suggests that the “hump of misfortune” recognized for a long time (the increase in stress, concern and depression which generally increases with age, reaches its highest point in the forties, then relieves in adulthood) may no longer exist. Researchers, led by David Blanchflower from Dartmouth College, United States, reported the results of the journal Plos a.

Since 2008, scientists have always documented a U-shaped relationship between age and well-being, where happiness tends to decrease from young people to quarantine and improve later in life. In addition to this model, the data showed a curve of “bad being”, often described as the bump of misfortune.

Evidence of American and British surveys

Recent studies suggest that the well-being of young generations falls into the world, but few surveys have considered what it means for the traditional bump of misfortune. To explore this, Blanchflower and his team examined the results of the United States and the United Kingdom survey which included questions on mental health. The American data set out more than 10 million adults interviewed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) between 1993 and 2024. In the United Kingdom, the data was taken from the longitudinal study of current households, which followed 40,000 households from 2009 to 2023.

Their analysis revealed that in the United States and the United Kingdom, the peak of quarantine in misfortune has disappeared. Instead, the levels of bad being now tend to decrease regularly with age. Among the people at the end of the forties and more, the mental health patterns remained relatively stable. The change seems to come from the worsening of mental health in younger age groups, rather than improvements in older adults.

Global data confirm a world change

Then the researchers analyzed data on nearly 2 million people from 44 countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, a mental health study called Global Minds. Covering the 1920s to 2025, these data suggest that the bump of misfortune has disappeared in the world.

The reasons for the disappearance of the bump from misfortune are not clear. The authors suggest several possibilities, including long-term impacts of the great recession on employment prospects for young people, under-financial mental health care services, mental health challenges posed by the COVID 19 pandemic and increased use of social media. Additional research is necessary to determine whether one of these factors or others is at stake.

A historical reversal of mental health trends

The authors add: “ours is the first article to show that the drop in mental health of young people in recent years means that today, both in the United States and in the United Kingdom, mental discomfort is the highest among young people and decline with age. This is a huge change compared to the past when there is an overview of serious mental health.

Reference: “The decline of the mental health of young people and the global disappearance of the form of the bump of misfortune” by David G. Blanchflower, Alex Bryson and Xiaowei Xu, August 27, 2025, Plos a.
DOI: 10.1371 / Journal.pone.0327858

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