Dartmouth and the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report Office will bring together leading experts and policymakers from around the world to discuss new data showing a recent collapse in mental health and well-being, especially among young people. 

The two-day conference, Healthy, Wealthier, Yet More Unhappy: A Symposium on Subjective Well-Being and Global Development, will take place on campus on Oct. 27 and 28, 2025, and will engage participants around potential causes of the phenomenon, effective strategies for measuring happiness and well-being, and best practices for addressing what is becoming a major health crisis in the United States and globally.

The event is part of Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock’s inaugural commitment to make mental health a focal point of her vision for Dartmouth, and to make Dartmouth a leader in research and the dissemination of solutions on this critical issue. It follows a historic panel on the national mental health crisis in the United States held at Dartmouth in 2023, which featured U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and seven of his predecessors, and Dartmouth’s appointment of its inaugural chief health and wellness officer, physician Estevan Garcia. 

“There is a growing consensus among researchers, based in part on work being done by our colleagues here at Dartmouth, that large numbers of young people are struggling with their mental health more today than their counterparts were 10 or 20 years ago, and there are troubling signs that this is an international trend,” says President Beilock, a prominent cognitive scientist and expert on the psychology of performance. 

“As a global community, we need to recognize this as an urgent problem and come together to implement evidence-based solutions to tackle it. I’m proud that Dartmouth is partnering with the UN to bring together some of the best minds in the world around this issue, and I look forward to incredible opportunities for the Dartmouth community to engage in dialogue around this important work.”

The symposium will inform a major UNDP human development report that will serve as a resource for researchers and policymakers around the world.

Beilock and Pedro Conceição, director of the UNDP’s Human Development Report Office, will open the conference on Oct. 27. Scholars from around the world have been invited to attend the event, which will include development practitioners and researchers from the United Nations Development Programme and other experts working on the topic.

“Well-being is key to assess development progress and evaluate policies, beyond income, as our recent series of Human Development Reports argues,” says Conceição. “Patterns of well-being and ill-being over different life stages that held over decades are now shifting, with many countries showing increases in ill-being amongst the young. Documenting and understanding the reasons behind these worrying shifts will be a key challenge for policymaking and international cooperation over the next few years.”

The symposium will feature two main sessions each day, each with a keynote address followed by a panel discussion. Sessions will be livestreamed for hybrid and virtual participation. Roundtable discussions with audience members will allow for participation by Dartmouth faculty and students. Day 1 will set the stage, assessing global trends in well-being, a discussion of the impact of digital devices in people’s lives, and dialogue on policy approaches. Day 2 will focus on current debates around well-being, including how it is defined and measured, and how it can be better integrated into human development frameworks and policy. 

“We are bringing the world to Dartmouth,” says David Blanchflower, the Bruce V. Rauner 1978 Professor at Dartmouth and an expert on happiness, who has been working closely with the UN this year to study international mental health trends and who has been a key organizer of the symposium. 

Blanchflower, an economist, is a trailblazer in the study of the economics of happiness whose research helped uncover a pattern in how individuals experience happiness and well-being throughout their lifetime. Over the course of two decades, he has published more than 30 papers showing that lifetime happiness could be graphed along a U-shaped curve, with most people experiencing the most happiness while young and old, and the least happiness in middle age. These findings have been replicated hundreds of times. 

But in recent years young people have been reporting increasing amounts of unhappiness, Blanchflower says. At first, he and his colleagues thought the data reflected short-term events, such as the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, but a closer analysis, recently published in the journal PLOS ONE, shows that the trend began shifting well before that.

“What we’ve discovered is that, from around 2013, the U-shaped pattern suddenly starts to disappear,” Blanchflower says. “It’s not that the pattern we saw was wrong; it changed. We’re faced with a situation, at Dartmouth and globally, where there’s been a collapse in the well-being of young people, and especially young women.” 

The trend has been replicated in the U.K., the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Italy. Blanchflower and his colleagues are working on UNDP HDRO-commissioned papers focused on Asian, African, and Latin American countries.

There is ongoing debate about the root causes of the trend. Many scholars, including Blanchflower, believe a major culprit has been the advent of smartphones. 

“When kids spend time on smartphones, they don’t engage with people face to face, and they don’t do some of the things we adults did when we were kids,” Blanchflower says. “Neuroscientists say that when people interact with each other, their brains establish important pathways for social and emotional behavior.” The argument is that the time children spend on smartphones is time that they otherwise would have spent engaging with others and developing their brains. They also risk exposure to potentially traumatic experiences, such as cyberbullying, which evidence shows can have lifelong negative effects, says Blanchflower, who recently published a paper in the International Journal of Wellbeing on how the experience of childhood traumas can have long-lasting effects into adulthood.

Some scholars, including Dartmouth’s own Andrew Campbell, the Albert Bradley 1915 Third Century Professor of Computer Science, are working on ways in which smartphones themselves can be part of the solution. Campbell won the 2024 UbiComp 10-Year Impact Award for a paper on how the StudentLife app developed by Campbell and his team helped monitor student mental health. 

“The point of the symposium is to get together and think about what we know about this problem, what others have learned, and what we can do about it. Because we don’t want a lost generation,” Blanchflower says. “We want to think of our campus as a lab.” 

The UNDP works in 170 countries and territories to eradicate poverty and reduce inequality, helping countries develop policies, leadership skills, partnerships, and institutional capabilities to achieve sustainable development goals around poverty and inequality, governance, resilience, environment, energy, and gender equality. 

The UNDP Human Development Report Office carries out research around the most important issues that affect human development in our societies, influencing global debates and informing practical policy changes that expand people’s opportunities, choice, and freedom across the world. Through global Human Development Reports since 1990, National and Regional HDRs, and groundbreaking satellite publications on, for example, gender social norms and human security, UNDP has leveraged the human development approach to drive development thinking. 

HDRO’s innovative data work is a global standard for tracking development progress. The Human Development Index, the Multidimensional Poverty Index, and the Gender Inequality Index are widely used around the world by academics, policymakers, students, and the public at large.

Among other efforts to address mental health and well-being on campus, last year Dartmouth unveiled Commitment to Care, which Beilock has described as a comprehensive plan to strategically address undergraduate mental health. 

As part of that effort, members of the campus community, including Richard S. Braddock 1963 Professor in Economics Bruce Sacerdote ’90, who has collaborated on research with Blanchflower, are helping to broaden student engagement with the outdoors, including through this past October’s Peak Bag, an annual event created by Dartmouth alumni to raise awareness of mental health and suicide prevention.