Screens are not the main culprit behind Europe’s youth mental health crisis. They merely amplify problems that already exist, and ignoring the crisis now could cost the EU €1.68tn over the next decade.
A new European Parliament study makes that case. Written by the consultancy Ipsos for the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS), the “Cost of non-Europe” report was commissioned by Parliament’s Committee on Public Health (SANT). It sets out six ways the EU could ease a youth mental health crisis it calls widespread, rising and unequal.
Why act now
One in five young people in the EU lives with a diagnosable mental disorder. Nearly half of 15 to 24 year-olds who need care cannot get it. Anxiety and depression lead the burden, and both keep rising.
Unchecked, youth mental ill-health will cost the EU-27 around €1.68tn between 2024 and 2033, about €177bn a year.
The cost of leaving it alone is the study’s core argument. Unchecked, youth mental ill-health will cost the EU-27 around €1.68tn between 2024 and 2033, about €177bn a year. The bill spans healthcare, social protection, education, and lost productivity, and rises through the decade even as the youth population shrinks.
A digital era problem, not a screen panic
The report links the trend to the world young people now inhabit, without blaming screens alone. Most disorders emerge early, three quarters by age 24. Persuasive design, harmful recommended content, and AI ‘companions’ can amplify existing vulnerabilities.
Digital technologies are not the sole or the primary cause.
— Yannick Vuylsteke, Ipsos
“Digital technologies are not the sole or the primary cause,” said Yannick Vuylsteke of Ipsos, one of the authors. The digital world, he added, acts as “an amplifier … that interacts with pre-existing offline vulnerabilities”. For most young people, the report notes, online life is neutral or beneficial when embedded in balanced lives and supported by protective offline relationships. The work is “evidence-based”, co-author Martin Kuehnemund stressed, resting “on the existing evidence, not on our personal views”.
What the study recommends
The central message is that prevention pays. Support built into schools and communities early, the study argues, costs less and works better than treating crises later. It sets out six options, all within existing EU powers.
The strongest evidence backs two. The first is school-based mental health promotion and digital wellbeing, scaling up proven programmes such as MindOut and Zippy’s Friends that teach coping skills and healthier online habits. The second is a framework for youth-friendly “early-intervention” hubs, low-threshold centres modelled on schemes like headspace and Jigsaw.
Both target what the study calls the “missing middle”, the gap between schools and specialist psychiatry where mild and moderate problems go untreated until they deepen. Today, waiting times for specialist child and adolescent care run into months or years.
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Widening the net
Three further options widen the net. Social prescribing would connect vulnerable young people, including those not in education or work, migrants, refugees, and LGBTQIA+ youth, to mentors and offline activities such as sport, art, and youth clubs. A quality-and-safety framework would vet mental-health apps through a “trusted library” of tools that work. And child-centred enforcement of existing digital law would press platforms on addictive design, harmful content, and age assurance. A sixth option, better data and monitoring, would track youth mental health across countries to steer the rest.
Prevention runs through the authors’ pitch. The best-evidenced response is “literacy, teaching how to use these safely”, Mr Vuylsteke said, not cutting access that already reaches “like 99.9 per cent” of young people. The seven country case studies behind the options, he added, were chosen because their interventions “work”.
What the EU can do next
The Union cannot redesign national health or education systems. But it can regulate platforms, set common standards, and fund and coordinate prevention. The options lean on tools already in place, from EU4Health, Erasmus+, and Horizon Europe to the Digital Services Act, the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act).
The €1.68tn figure is deliberately broad. Mr Kuehnemund called it “an order of magnitude of the size of the problem”, not a precise bill, and said pricing individual measures “would be preposterous” and better left to a future European Commission impact assessment.
The study now feeds SANT’s work, and lands amid a push already under way. In June 2025, EU health ministers called for better protection of children and adolescents online, including safer-designed products and media-literacy campaigns. Whether the recommendations become EU action, and how far new digital rules should reach, is the open question.
For the authors, the logic is about timing. Invest in young people’s mental health early, they argue, and Europe pays less, and gains more, later.
