Dr Darío Moreno Agostino (UCL Institute of Education) outlines his research on the mental health of baby boomers and Generation X, revealing persistent gender and socioeconomic inequalities and rising distress during the pandemic, in an article for The Conversation.
It's been almost five years since the end of the COVID lockdowns. Yet the world is still continuing to learn about how mental health changed during - and after - this unprecedented time.
My colleagues and I wanted to understand how mental health had changed across the life course of baby boomers and generation X - including during and beyond the pandemic.
We also wanted to understand if (and how) gender and socioeconomic inequalities had changed throughout these periods. Previous research we'd conducted had shown that large, existing gender inequalities in mental ill-health had widened during the pandemic period.
Moreover, the post-lockdown period came with a marked increase in the cost of living - making ends meet harder in a context where there had already been high levels of poverty for decades before.
We found that, on average, mental health bounced back to levels similar to those recorded before the pandemic. However, women and people from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds continued to experience worse mental health across their adult lives, including after the pandemic. And those inequalities could be traced back to their early lives.
To conduct our study, we analysed data from two nationally representative British birth cohorts: the 1958 National Child Development Study and the 1970 British Cohort Study.
These ongoing studies follow the lives of all people born in Britain during one particular week in 1958 and 1970. Information is collected on each participant's physical and mental health, as well as their social, economic and family circumstances.
These studies gave us the unique opportunity to investigate how different outcomes - including mental health - changed across the life course in baby boomers and generation X.
For our study, we looked at the same 14,182 people over up to four decades: 6,553 of whom were born in 1958 and 7,629 who were born in 1970.
We used the same measure of psychological distress (which encompasses a range of unpleasant mental states, such as feeling depressed, worried or scared) in both cohorts. This allowed us to understand how mental health had changed in the same participants throughout their adult lives - between the ages of 23-64 for baby boomers and 26-52 for generation X.
To ensure our results weren't due to differences in measurement, we tested this tool to ensure it provided comparable measures across cohorts, genders, socioeconomic backgrounds and ages.
To examine inequalities by gender and socioeconomic background, we used information on sex assigned at birth, parental social class and housing tenure (whether their parents owned or rented their home) when participants were children (aged five-11).
We also examined the intersection of gender and socioeconomic background to understand any dual impact these inequalities may have on mental health throughout adulthood.
