A new UN report asks us to rethink youth mental health not simply as a matter of individual symptoms, but as a question of the wider ecosystems in which young people live, learn and work.

There is a sentence in the middle of the United Nations’ new report on youth mental health that I have not been able to set down: “There is no ‘cure’ for being human”. Thriving, its authors write, does not mean the absence of hardship. It is a rare admission for an institution whose native idiom is targets and indicators, and it signals something larger than a change of tone.

Youth Mental Health & Well-being in an Uncertain World: A Global Call to Action, produced by the UN Youth Office and the United Nations University International Institute for Global Health and launched in September’s UN General Assembly, asks governments to stop treating young people’s distress mainly as a matter of individual symptoms. Instead it proposes an ecosystem model of 10 linked domains: governance, education, decent work, housing, climate, digital technology, peace, the arts, sport and spirituality. Each can tend or erode a young person’s life.

Youth Mental Health: The Sobering Global Figures

The figures are sobering. One in seven people aged 10 to 19 lives with a mental health condition, and half of these conditions emerge by 18. Suicide remains among the leading causes of death for the young, and close to three-quarters of the world’s suicides occur in low- and middle-income countries. Yet only 56% of countries have a child and adolescent mental health policy, against 81% with adult policies, and most spend less than 2% of their health budgets on mental health.

More telling than the numbers is the report’s philosophical turn. Drawing on Tyler VanderWeele’s flourishing research at Harvard, it insists that well-being belongs to the person and to her world at once: the tree and the forest must both be doing well. It speaks of relational well-being, of care, connection and community as the ground of collective health, and of each young person as, in some measure, the embodiment of her surroundings.

Flourishing Denied

African readers will recognise this terrain. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu; motho ke motho ka batho: a person is a person through other persons. Ubuntu has long held that personhood is not a possession but an achievement of relation, and that no self can flourish in a community that is failing. The report arrives, by way of Harvard, at a truth spoken in isiZulu, isiXhosa and Sesotho for generations. I welcome that convergence, and want to push it further.

In my own work I call this condition flourishing denied: the tearing of the relational webs that hold a life, from the household to the planet. Read this way, much of what we name youth mental illness is not, or not only, a malfunction inside the young person. It is an accurate registration of a world that has come apart around her. The report comes close to saying so. Citing UNICEF, it notes that six in 10 young people faced systemic challenges in the past year, led by economic instability and climate change, and that more than half lack hope for the future. UNESCO, it adds, has found an erosion of young people’s belief in their own futures, rooted in historical injustice. Despair of this kind is not a disorder of perception. It is, very often, perception itself.

This matters because the language of resilience, which the report uses generously, can return the burden to the young. We teach adolescents to regulate their emotions, to breathe, to cope, and then send them out into economies that have no place for them. Resilience is a virtue; it is not a policy. No young person should have to become heroically adaptable to survive conditions a decent society would not impose.

Nowhere is this clearer than at home. In the second quarter of this year Statistics South Africa reported youth unemployment of 47.4% among 15- to 34-year-olds, and more than a third of 15- to 24-year-olds were neither employed nor in education or training. The report cites South African research finding that between 21 and 24.5% of students live with conditions ranging from social anxiety to post-traumatic stress. Set side by side, these figures make the ecosystem model concrete. For many young South Africans, decent work is not one domain among 10; it is the load-bearing wall.

Hope In Its Pages

The report’s most consequential move is to anchor all this in human rights. It recalls the Secretary-General’s insistence that mental health is a right, not a privilege, and General Assembly resolution A/RES/77/300, which defines mental health not by the absence of a condition but by an environment in which dignity is respected. South Africa needs no persuading. Our Constitution guarantees access to health care, adequate housing and a basic education, and an environment not harmful to health or well-being. The report offers a way to read these guarantees together: a student’s panic attack in an overcrowded residence may be a housing question, a safety question and a labour-market question.

There is hope in its pages too. Much of the report’s texture comes from youth-led initiatives, many of them African: peer-support circles, restorative justice networks, arts-based healing, digital helplines. Young people are already building the ecosystems that states have been slow to fund, and the report rightly insists that they be co-authors of the response, not its beneficiaries.

A call to action is only as good as the action it calls forth, and the report is candid that policies on paper have not yet become services on the ground. Its model is a map. What South Africa needs now is the political will to walk it: to budget for mental health, to design labour, housing and education policy with young minds in view, and to resource the young people already doing the work.

There is an isiZulu word I return to often: ngisazophumelela, I will yet succeed; I am still becoming. It is not a statement of certainty but a grammar of persistence, a future tense spoken from inside difficulty. The question the UN has put to us is whether we will build a world in which it can come true.

Disclaimer: Prof Bohler-Muller writes in her personal capacity and does not necessarily represent the views or position of the University of the Free State. 

Is tuna safe to eat? That question has gained attention after a study from Brazil found a high prevalence of parasites in skipjack tuna. The researchers found parasites in 51 of 53 fish they examined. More importantly, some of the parasites were found in the muscle tissue, the part of the fish that people eat. The finding raised a food-safety concern. Some fish parasites, including Anisakis, can infect humans when contaminated seafood is eaten raw or inadequately cooked. This makes the presence of parasites in edible fish tissue more than a biological curiosity.

The concern has also reached India, where tuna is widely consumed. But the Brazilian study was conducted on fish caught in the Atlantic Ocean off Brazil. It does not tell us how common these parasites are in tuna caught in Indian waters. That distinction is now at the centre of an advisory from the ICAR-Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (ICAR-CMFRI), Kochi.

What did the Brazil Study Find?

Researchers examined 53 skipjack tuna (Katsuwonus pelamis) caught off the Brazilian coast. Parasites were found in 51 fish, or 96% of the sample. The researchers recorded more than 1,500 parasites. They included Anisakis and parasites belonging to the Trypanorhyncha group.

The finding that drew the most attention was their presence in muscle tissue. Parasites were detected in the muscle of 31 fish, accounting for 58.5% of the sample. This is relevant to consumers because the muscle is the part of the fish that is normally eaten.

The researchers also pointed to the importance of removing the internal organs soon after the fish is caught. Proper handling can help reduce the movement of parasites from the viscera into the muscle.

Why did this Raise Questions in India?

The concern is easy to understand. If parasites can occur in the flesh of skipjack tuna, consumers may wonder whether the same thing happens in tuna sold in India. Parasite prevalence can differ between geographical regions. It can also depend on local ecological conditions and the availability of intermediate or secondary hosts such as copepods, according to CMFRI.

The study therefore does not establish that Indian tuna has the same parasite prevalence as the Brazilian sample.

What does CMFRI Say?

CMFRI has advised consumers not to avoid tuna or other commercially available fish simply because parasites have been reported in fish from a particular region. The institute says fish examined along the Indian coast, including tuna, have not shown external manifestations of harmful parasitic infestation.

CMFRI also says its scientists regularly examine fish, including skipjack tuna, for abnormalities and parasites. “Scientists at CMFRI regularly examine fish, including skipjack tuna, as part of fish biology studies and observe fish for abnormalities and parasites whenever necessary. The fish examined do not show external manifestations of harmful parasitic infestation,” said Dr Grinson George, Director, ICAR-CMFRI.

What Should Consumers Do?

CMFRI recommends proper handling and cleaning of fish. Prompt removal of the intestines and other viscera is important during processing. Thorough cooking provides another layer of protection. CMFRI says proper cooking kills parasites and significantly reduces the associated food-safety risk.

The concern is greater with raw or lightly cooked seafood. In such cases, the parasite burden of the particular fish and how it has been processed become important factors.

For Indian consumers, the Brazilian study is not evidence that Indian tuna is unsafe. The more immediate lesson is about food handling. Clean fish properly, remove the viscera promptly and cook it thoroughly. There is no need to avoid tuna solely because parasites were reported in fish from Brazil.

Skin loses elasticity, muscles become weaker and injuries can take longer to heal as we age. But many changes linked to ageing begin much earlier, inside our cells. Some cells eventually enter a state called senescence. They stop dividing but remain alive. Senescent cells are a normal part of the body and can help with development, wound healing and tissue repair. As they build up with age, however, they have been linked to inflammation and changes in how tissues function.

Scientists are interested in these cells because of their possible role in ageing and age-related diseases. But the main problem about studying them is that some of the methods used to find them, destroy the cells in the process. Researchers often look for proteins such as p16 and p21, which help control cell division. Other methods examine which genes are active inside a cell. These techniques can provide detailed information, but they usually require cells to be processed or destroyed.

Researchers at MIT have now combined two types of information to find senescent cells without relying entirely on these destructive methods. They used Raman microscopy, which uses light to reveal the chemical makeup of cells, alongside gene-expression data from individual cells.

Together, the measurements helped the team identify a set of features that can distinguish senescent cells. They describe this combination as a “multimodal barcode” for cellular senescence. The study, published in Nature Aging, used skin and lung tissue from mice that were two months and 26 months old.

Reading the Chemical Makeup of a Cell

Raman microscopy works by measuring how light changes when it interacts with molecules in a cell. The pattern of scattered light provides information about the chemicals present in the tissue. One advantage of the technique is that it can examine tissue without destroying the cells. The researchers combined these measurements with information about which genes were active in the cells and where those cells were located in the tissue. They found several differences between young and older tissue. Cells in both the skin and lungs of older mice showed increased production and build-up of fats, known as lipids.

The changes were not the same in every tissue. In the lungs, older cells showed greater activity in genes linked to immune responses and inflammation. In the skin, the researchers found changes in processes involved in collagen and the structure that supports cells and tissues.

The team then looked for Raman signals that were closely linked to senescence. They combined the most useful chemical signals with gene-expression patterns to build their barcode. One of the signals was linked to lipids and appeared around 1,131–1,135 cm⁻¹ in the Raman spectrum. It was associated with cells carrying the senescence marker p21.

The researchers used machine learning to combine the different signals. The result was a set of chemical and genetic features that could help distinguish senescent cells from other cells. If the approach works in human tissue, researchers may eventually be able to look for a smaller number of these chemical signals instead of testing for individual markers.

Why Longevity Researchers are Interested

Senescent cells are now an important area of longevity research, which looks at why we age and how people might stay healthy for longer. One approach being studied is the use of senolytics, drugs designed to remove certain senescent cells.

Most research on senolytics has been carried out in cells and animals. Human studies are still limited, and there is no evidence yet that removing senescent cells can extend human lifespan. A 2024 clinical trial involving 60 postmenopausal women tested the drugs dasatinib and quercetin for their effects on bone health. The treatment did not meet the study’s main goal across all participants, although the researchers reported some early findings that they said need further study.

One reason researchers need better ways to detect senescent cells is that they still do not fully understand which of these cells should be targeted, where they are found or how they change in different tissues. A method that can find these cells without destroying the tissue could help researchers answer some of those questions and study potential treatments.

Could This Eventually be Used in People?

The MIT system is still at an early stage. At present, analysing about one square millimetre of tissue takes around 30 hours. The researchers are working on a faster system that could scan larger areas. They also need to test the method in human tissue.

The current study was carried out in mice, so the researchers cannot yet assume that the same chemical signals will identify senescent cells in people. They will need to test the barcode across different human tissues and determine how well it can distinguish senescence from other changes that occur in cells.

The researchers have suggested that, in the future, similar technology could potentially be used in an endoscope to look for senescent cells inside the body. That remains a long-term possibility rather than a current medical application. For now, the study gives scientists another way to study cellular ageing. By combining information about the chemicals inside cells with information about their genes, the researchers have identified a set of signals that could help them find senescent cells more easily.

For longevity research, that could be useful. Before scientists can decide whether certain senescent cells should be removed or treated, they first need to know where those cells are and what they are doing.