The Quiet Crisis We Keep Ignoring
Universities need to fund counselling services as a genuine commitment, not a box-ticking exercise. Policymakers need to allocate budget to mental health as a first-order public health priority. The private sector needs to stop treating employee wellness as a branding exercise and start treating it as a structural responsibility.
Every single one of them. That is what the number says, and I want you to sit with it for a moment before we move on. In a room of twenty young Bangladeshi influencers brought together for a wellness retreat, every single one reported experiencing depression. Every single one reported anxiety. Every single one reported having been betrayed by someone they trusted. And every single one reported having experienced molestation or sexual assault.
20 out of 20.
We conducted two studies. One was a large survey across ten universities in Dhaka, capturing the daily reality of hundreds of students aged 19 to 24. The other was an intimate retreat with 20 young influencers, people with platforms and followers and the outward appearance of having it together.
Different methodologies, different populations, different scales. The same story underneath. Bangladesh's young people are not fine. And almost nobody is talking about it.
What the University Students Told Us
Across BRAC University, North South, East West, AIUB, IUB and five other leading universities, students reported stress levels that should give every educator, policymaker and parent pause. 35% experience stress every single day. 30% feel stressed most days. That is nearly two thirds of our university students living in a near-constant state of stress, and we have normalized it so thoroughly that most of them do not even register it as a problem anymore. It is just how life feels.
Sleep deprivation runs alongside it. 24% sleep only five to six hours a night. 13% have no consistent sleep pattern at all. 20.8% feel mentally overwhelmed daily, not during exams, not in crisis moments, but as a baseline condition of their ordinary days. 19% feel lonely often. Nearly 29% have no safe space for creative expression. 11% are experiencing abuse on a regular basis.
And here is the thing that breaks my heart about these numbers. 75% of these same students feel confident they can drive community change. 85% are actively engaged in climate-positive action.
This is a generation with purpose and fire and a genuine desire to build something better. They are doing all of that while quietly drowning, and they have learned to keep swimming anyway because nobody told them they were allowed to stop and ask for help.
What the Influencers Told Us
The retreat findings add a dimension the university survey cannot capture, which is what happens when you take the performance away. When you put young people in a room where nobody is watching and ask them to be honest.
Every single participant reported depression and anxiety. Every single one reported betrayal as a lived experience. Every single one reported having been sexually violated in some form.
Half of them, 10 out of 20, reported having experienced suicidal thoughts. 13 out of 20 reported struggling with addiction. 15 out of 20 reported a fear of rejection so significant it shapes how they move through the world. 15 out of 20 reported a lack of self-compassion, an inability to be kind to themselves, to forgive themselves, to believe they deserve care.
These are young people with audiences, over a million followers in total. Young people who post and inspire and appear, from the outside, to be living well. And inside, privately, in a room where they finally felt safe enough to tell the truth, this is what was there.
The gap between the self that performs and the self that suffers is not unique to influencers. It is the defining psychological condition of this generation. Social media did not create the pressure to appear fine. But it industrialized it.
The Shame That Makes It Worse
In all our years of running wellness programmes in Bangladesh, the barrier is almost never that people do not want help. It is that they have been taught, in ways both direct and invisible, that needing help is a failure. That anxiety means weakness. That talking about how you feel is an indulgence. That the correct response to being overwhelmed is to push through, work harder, sleep less, ask less.
The influencers at our retreat asked for something specific. They asked media to break the silence and destigmatize therapy. They asked schools to employ trained in-house therapists. They asked the private sector to tackle workplace toxicity. They asked fellow influencers to openly share their own mental health struggles. They asked, essentially, for the culture to change. For the permission to be human to become public and unconditional.
That is not a small ask. But it is not an impossible one either.
What this Requires from Institutions
Bangladesh has fewer than 300 psychiatrists for 175 million people. University counselling services, where they exist at all, are under-resourced and carry enough stigma that most students would not walk through the door even if they knew where it was. There is no national mental health policy that treats youth emotional wellbeing as a public health priority on the level of, say, maternal health or nutrition.
This is a structural failure, not a personal one. And it has a cost. Untreated mental health challenges do not stay personal. They become dropout rates and broken families and lost productivity and in the worst cases, lives ended too soon. 10 out of 20 young people in a room quietly carrying thoughts of suicide is not a statistic to scroll past.
Universities need to fund counselling services as a genuine commitment, not a box-ticking exercise. Policymakers need to allocate budget to mental health as a first-order public health priority. The private sector needs to stop treating employee wellness as a branding exercise and start treating it as a structural responsibility. And all of us, in our families, our conversations, our classrooms, need to keep saying clearly that seeking help is not weakness. It is the most courageous and intelligent thing a person can do.
What Actually Moves People
What our work has taught us, over and over, is that healing does not wait for the perfect policy environment. A room where people breathe together. A class where the body gets to move. A space where someone shares their story and the rest of the room recognizes themselves in it. A method we call ‘shareapy’. These things work. Not as replacements for clinical care but as entry points, as the thing that makes it possible for someone who has been performing fine for years to begin, carefully, telling the truth about how they actually are.
This is why we are bringing the National Youth Wellness Festival, You Be You: Find Your Flow, to BRAC University on April 22 and 23. Ten universities. A thousand voices. Two days of yoga, meditation, art, music, and real conversation. Not a conference. An experience. Because information does not change people. Felt understanding does.
The data from both our studies points to the same place. Young Bangladeshis are carrying more than anyone has acknowledged, more than the system was built to support, more than silence can hold. They are also, as the data shows, deeply committed to building something better. They believe in community. They believe in change. They believe, 75% of them, that they have the power to lead it.
We believe that too. But they cannot do it alone, and they should not have to.
Shazia Omar is a novelist and the founder of The Flow Fest, Bangladesh's premier wellness company. The National Youth Wellness Festival, You Be You: Find Your Flow, takes place April 22 and 23 at BRAC University. Register at theflowfest.com/youth.
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