By Tom O'Kelly, Senior Research Manager
In recent years the Armed Forces has often been pointed to as a potential route to solving some of the UK's growing societal issues. Whether it's Rishi Sunak suggesting the reintroduction of military service for young people, or the numerous talk radio discussions about how young people should join the military to learn life skills, resilience and work ethic, these debates are nothing new. But how accurate are they in placing the Armed Forces as a genuine route to solving one of the biggest issues facing the UK's young adults, the NEET crisis (people not in education, employment or training)?
The scale of that problem isn't in question. Just over a million 16 to 24 year olds in the UK are currently not in education, employment or training, around one in eight of that age group and the highest figure on record.
The government's own review into rising youth economic inactivity, led by Alan Milburn, puts mental health and disability at the centre of the issue. Nearly half of NEET young people now report a health condition that limits their ability to work, up from around a quarter a decade ago. Among those with a disabling condition, mental health has overtaken physical health as the most commonly cited primary cause, rising from about a quarter in 2011 to over four in ten today. And the longer someone stays out of education, employment and training, the harder that becomes to reverse. Of those out for under a year, 65% return to participation within twelve months. Past a year out, that falls to 25%. That is a compounding issue that can easily spiral for more and more young people.
To understand where the Armed Forces might genuinely fit into that picture, it helps to look at what mental health actually looks like across the UK population as a whole. Using data from the Global Web Index (GWI) gives a clear starting point. Across UK adults, 35% describe themselves as prone to anxiety, 18% report having a mental health condition, and 14% say social media specifically causes them anxiety.
Break that population down by age and a sharper picture appears. 16 to 24 year olds report the highest rate of anxiety of any age group, 41% against the 35% national average, and the highest rate of mental health conditions too, 23% against 18% nationally. They're also considerably more likely than the average adult to say social media causes them anxiety, at 22%. What's genuinely striking is what happens to comfort discussing it. Rather than being the most open generation, as you might expect from a cohort raised on destigmatised, always online conversation about mental health, 16 to 24 year olds report the lowest comfort talking about their mental health of any age band, 38% against 48% nationally. The generation carrying the heaviest mental health burden is also, on this measure, the least equipped to talk about it. Separate research from Channel 4 and Craft points in a similar direction. Their 2024 study of Gen Z found a similar paradox, a majority say they're broadly happy, yet growing numbers report loneliness and a declining sense of control, alongside mental health pressure that this age group feels more acutely than any other.
This is the context that makes the Armed Forces comparison worth taking seriously. A familiar stereotype is that Armed Forces personnel simply don't talk about their problems, stiff upper lip, get on with it, suffer in silence. If that were true, comfort discussing mental health among Armed Forces personnel should sit well below the national average. It doesn't. 46% of Armed Forces personnel say they're comfortable talking about their mental health, in line with the national average of 48%, and significantly higher than the 38% recorded among 16 to 24 year olds. The group stereotyped as least willing to talk about their mental health is, on this particular measure, more open than the generation assumed to be the most open.
In addition Armed Forces personnel report anxiety at 20%, against 35% nationally and 41% among 16 to 24 year olds, and mental health conditions at 14%, against 18% nationally and 23% among the youngest adults. The Ministry of Defence's own figures point the same way. In the past year, 12% of Armed Forces personnel were seen in military healthcare for a mental health related reason, broadly in line with how often the general population sees a GP about mental health, again suggesting a population willing to seek support rather than avoid it. Nobody can prove causation from a set of surveys, however there's a plausible mechanism behind the pattern, not just a correlation sitting unexplained.
A study of nearly 5,000 UK personnel deployed to Iraq found that stronger unit cohesion, feeling that leaders take a genuine interest, feeling informed, feeling part of a team, was linked to significantly lower rates of PTSD and common mental health disorders. Structure, purpose, physical activity and belonging appear to be doing real work here, not simply encouraging people to keep quiet about the alternative.
Put the two pictures side by side and the opportunity is hard to ignore. The generation most likely to become NEET is also the generation reporting the highest anxiety, the highest rate of mental health conditions, and, paradoxically, the lowest comfort discussing any of it. Armed Forces personnel show close to the opposite profile on every one of those same measures, while remaining just as willing to talk about their mental health as the country at large. That isn't a coincidence built on stiff upper lips. It looks far more like a byproduct of structure, purpose and belonging, the very things increasingly absent from the daily lives of young people drifting out of education, training and work.
None of this means military service is the answer for every disengaged young person, or that the Armed Forces should become a mental health service by another name. But the data makes a genuine case that Defence has built something (structured routine, meaningful tasks and a team that has your back) that could be incredibly valuable to a generation struggling with exactly the problems it appears to address. The question is not whether every young person should join the Armed Forces, but whether Britain can build a modern civic offer around the same foundations of resilience, purpose and belonging.