Community Connections Matter for the Mental Health of Politically Active Youth

Posted by CIRCLE on August 8, 2023

New research suggests that civic engagement can be associated with worse mental health for youth, but having access to community assets and strong connections can help.

There has been increasing attention to the state of young people’s mental health. In 2021, the Surgeon General declared youth mental health as an urgent public health issue that requires the nation’s immediate awareness and action. That same year, the CDC reported that more than 4 in 10 high school students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and this number had been steadily increasing since 2011. The pandemic is no doubt a major factor contributing to the declining mental health among young people.

In this analysis, we used data from the CIRCLE 2022 post-election survey to explore the mental health of young people, ages 18-29, and how it relates to political engagement and voting. We explore whether young people who are thinking about and addressing major social issues (gun violence, abortion, climate change, etc.) may experience a negative or positive impact on their mental health due to taking action on the issues that matter to them.

We also examine connections between mental health and young people’s behaviors as civic actors to begin to understand how they may be linked. Importantly, we consider whether youth’s access to resources in their environment plays a role in determining what young people experience when they are politically active. Our analysis will test whether youth with more community assets and connections will have different mental health outcomes related to their political engagement than youth who do not have access to people and relationships that can support their action-taking.

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