The latest reporting on youth psychological distress in Tairāwhiti is grim reading, but it is difficult to feel surprised by it anymore. We are told that one in three young people in Gisborne are experiencing moderate psychological distress, and the article presents this as a growing crisis demanding urgent attention. The numbers are serious, and the suffering behind them is real. Young people are clearly struggling. But what is striking is how discussions around youth mental health in New Zealand are almost always framed in ways that avoid confronting the social system producing the misery in the first place. Distress is treated as though it exists in isolation from the conditions people are forced to live under. The language used is clinical, managerial, and depoliticised. We hear about “wellbeing outcomes”, “access to services”, “interventions”, and “resilience”, but very little about poverty, alienation, capitalism, or colonialism. The result is a conversation that recognises suffering while carefully avoiding its root causes.
If one in three young people in Gisborne are psychologically distressed, this should not be viewed as some inexplicable public health anomaly. It should be understood as the predictable outcome of life under a system that organises society around profit instead of human need. Young people are growing up in an environment defined by economic insecurity, social fragmentation, housing stress, ecological anxiety, and increasingly bleak prospects for the future. They are expected to navigate rising costs of living, unstable work, impossible housing markets, underfunded schools and collapsing public services while constantly being told that success or failure is ultimately their individual responsibility. The pressures are relentless, and they are not accidental.
The article briefly gestures toward social pressures affecting rangatahi, but like much mainstream reporting it ultimately reduces distress to something that exists primarily inside individuals. The proposed solutions therefore remain individualistic as well. More support services, better awareness, earlier intervention, improved access to counselling. None of these things are bad in themselves. People absolutely need support, and mental health services in New Zealand are chronically overstretched. But the liberal obsession with treatment after the damage has already been done avoids asking why the damage is occurring on such a massive scale in the first place. Therapy cannot substitute for social transformation. Counselling cannot resolve structural despair. No amount of mindfulness exercises or mental health campaigns can make life feel meaningful in a society where increasing numbers of young people feel economically disposable and socially disconnected.
One of the more revealing moments in the article comes when entrepreneurship is raised as part of the solution for struggling youth. This is presented almost instinctively, as though encouraging young people to become entrepreneurs is an obvious pathway toward empowerment and wellbeing. It says a great deal about the ideological limits of mainstream thinking that even in discussions about psychological distress, the answer eventually circles back to the market. Young people are suffering under capitalism, therefore the proposed solution is to integrate them more deeply into capitalist logic.
Entrepreneurship today is treated almost like a secular religion. Politicians, business leaders, and media commentators constantly promote the idea that the path out of insecurity lies in innovation, hustle, self-branding, and small business ambition. The entrepreneur becomes the ideal neoliberal citizen: endlessly adaptable, self-motivated, individually responsible, permanently productive. Structural problems disappear into personal initiative. If opportunities are scarce, invent your own. If wages are low, start a side hustle. If work is insecure, monetise your passions. If the future feels hopeless, become a “creator” or “founder”.
But this mythology collapses under even basic scrutiny. Most small businesses fail. Most entrepreneurs do not become wealthy success stories. In reality, entrepreneurship under capitalism often means precarious self-employment, unstable income, debt, stress, overwork, and the constant pressure to commodify every aspect of your life. The romantic image of the entrepreneur masks the reality that capitalism increasingly offloads risk from corporations and the state onto individuals themselves.
More importantly, entrepreneurship does nothing to address the structural causes of youth distress. A young person struggling with housing insecurity, poverty, isolation, family stress, or hopelessness about the future is not liberated simply because they are encouraged to “think entrepreneurially”. In many ways, this rhetoric intensifies the problem because it deepens the idea that individuals alone are responsible for overcoming systemic conditions. If you fail, it becomes your fault for not hustling hard enough.
There is also something deeply contradictory about presenting entrepreneurship as a solution in regions already suffering from economic neglect and inequality. Tairāwhiti does not need more motivational speeches about innovation culture. It needs material investment, housing, healthcare, decent wages, infrastructure, and community control over resources. It needs collective solutions, not another version of neoliberal individualism dressed up as empowerment.
The entrepreneurial fantasy also reflects a broader ideological shift under neoliberal capitalism where collective politics is replaced by individual aspiration. Previous generations of working-class politics at least recognised that social problems required collective struggle and structural change. Today, even despair is increasingly privatised. Instead of asking why communities are impoverished, people are encouraged to become personal brands within the very system impoverishing them.
Young people today are inheriting a world defined by crisis. Climate catastrophe hangs permanently over the horizon. Stable employment is disappearing. Rent devours huge portions of income. Home ownership becomes more impossible every year. Education increasingly functions as a debt-producing conveyor belt into insecure labour. Social life itself becomes more commodified and isolated. Even leisure is increasingly mediated through screens, algorithms, and corporate platforms designed to monetise attention and insecurity. It is hardly shocking that distress levels are rising. What would be shocking is if they were not.
Capitalism produces alienation because it reduces human beings to economic units. Our worth becomes tied to productivity, employability, and consumption. Relationships become transactional. Time becomes fragmented around work and survival. Communities weaken as competition intensifies. Under these conditions, anxiety and depression are not individual malfunctions but rational responses to a profoundly unhealthy society. The system constantly generates insecurity and then blames individuals for failing to cope with it.
This is especially visible among young people because they are often the first to feel the contradictions most sharply. They are told from childhood that if they work hard enough, stay positive enough, and make the right choices, they can build a decent future for themselves. But the material reality surrounding them increasingly contradicts this narrative. They see parents working exhausting hours while still struggling financially. They see graduates trapped in debt and precarious employment. They see governments endlessly discussing housing affordability while homelessness grows more visible every year. They see corporations making record profits during a cost-of-living crisis. They see politicians speak about climate action while continuing to expand industries driving ecological destruction. The future offered to many young people is one of permanent instability dressed up in the language of opportunity.
In regions like Tairāwhiti these pressures are intensified by long histories of colonial violence and economic neglect. Māori communities have experienced generations of dispossession, land theft, state violence, and deliberate underdevelopment. Poverty in these communities did not emerge naturally. It was created politically and economically. Colonisation shattered communal systems of life and replaced them with exploitative structures designed to enrich settlers and the capitalist economy. The effects continue across generations through inequality, housing insecurity, over-policing, family stress, addiction, and reduced access to resources and opportunities. When Māori youth experience high levels of psychological distress, this cannot be separated from the historical and ongoing realities of colonisation.
Yet mainstream discussions often strip this history away. Distress becomes individualised and medicalised rather than understood politically. The same state that participated in destroying Māori social structures now presents itself as the neutral manager of the resulting social crisis. Governments promise targeted interventions while maintaining the economic conditions producing suffering in the first place. It is a cycle that repeats endlessly. Communities are destabilised through poverty and marginalisation, then handed underfunded services to manage the fallout.
There is also something deeply revealing about the way resilience is constantly discussed in these conversations. Young people are repeatedly told they need greater resilience, better coping mechanisms, improved emotional regulation, and healthier habits. Again, none of these things are inherently bad. But resilience discourse often functions ideologically. It subtly shifts responsibility away from social structures and onto individuals. If you are struggling, the implication becomes that you lack the psychological tools to cope properly. The focus turns toward adapting individuals to unhealthy conditions rather than changing the conditions themselves.
A society that demands endless resilience from its young people is often a society failing them profoundly.
The reality is that many forms of psychological distress are deeply social in origin. Loneliness, hopelessness, anxiety, addiction, despair, and even interpersonal violence do not emerge in a vacuum. They are shaped by the environments people live within. Capitalism fragments collective life. It isolates people from one another while simultaneously intensifying competition between them. It creates constant insecurity while promoting impossible ideals of success and happiness. Social media often amplifies these dynamics, but social media itself is not the root problem. It is a technological expression of broader capitalist relations. Endless comparison, self-branding, performative identity, commodified attention, and algorithmic insecurity all mirror the wider values of capitalist society.
Politicians frequently describe youth mental health as though it were a technical policy challenge requiring improved coordination between agencies and service providers. But the scale of the crisis suggests something much deeper. If distress is becoming normalised among huge sections of the population, perhaps the problem is not simply access to treatment but the structure of society itself.