Mental illness and madness among young people across Britain has skyrocketed.

One in five people aged 8-25 years old have a probable mental disorder. Hundreds of thousands of children and young people have to wait months - even years - for help that is often completely inadequate. Many are paying the price with their lives.

But whilst young people fight for survival, no one in government has asked what is driving this crisis - or acknowledged their responsibility for the economic and social policies fuelling it.

That’s why 25 young people with lived experience came together to write ‘The Mad Youth Manifesto’—a collective statement that argues mental distress is fundamentally a systemic and collective issue. More on this below!

For years and years, a coalition of unaccountable companies acting in their own self-interest have pursued business strategies that have maximised both profits and misery.

Big tech firms are surveilling and exploiting us. Big oil and gas firms are destroying our planet and our future. Corporate employers have worked with governments to deny us decent work and wages. Property developers and landlords have raised our rents and chucked us out of our homes.

Meanwhile, there has been an explosion of private mental healthcare provision - meaning that your only chance of getting quality, timely, mental healthcare is paying large sums out of your own pocket. For so many young people suffocated by austerity and trapped in insecure jobs and housing, this is simply not an option.

Faced with these conditions, is it any wonder so many of us are driven into madness?

Mad Youth Organise is a campaign led by young people with lived experience of mental distress and madness - and we are organising to build a collective response to the crisis we are facing. We’re done with empty mental health “awareness” campaigns: we want to hold the institutions and executives who profit from our misery to account.

Through direct action, story-telling, investigation and alliances, we’ll show that our suffering isn’t individual or accidental — it’s engineered for profit. We will channel our lived experience to force lifesaving shifts in mental health policy.

Join us in calling for a future where young people can thrive, not just barely survive.

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The MAd Youth Manifesto

The Mad Youth Manifesto is a powerful collective statement by 25 young people (aged 18-30) with lived experience of mental illness, challenging the individualistic narrative of mental health. The manifesto demands a holistic understanding of mental health that recognises societal inequities, rejecting medical models that blame individuals and instead calling for radical systemic change and collective action to address the root causes of mental suffering. Read it here!

Our demands

1. Decommodify the services that we rely on for life, and that give us our human rights, such as education, housing, water, energy and healthcare.

2. Shut down toxic, extractive industries, such as the fossil fuel industry, which are profiting from the destruction of our futures.

3. Curb corporate power by ending damaging monopolies and cleaning up the corruption and lobbying undermining our democracy.

4. Demand corporations pay for the harm they have caused by compensating affected communities.

5. Nourish the lives of young people with comprehensive and accessible care, and community.

6. Make policy as if the future counts. Give 16-year-olds the vote, implement radical democratic reforms, and include young people in policy and decision making. Stop persecuting society’s most vulnerable for the failings of the most powerful.

PATIENT STORIES