Young people living in the most deprived stretches of England\u2019s coastline are three times more likely to be living with an undiagnosed mental health condition than their peers inland, according to new research.<\/p>\n
This \u201ccoastal mental health gap\u201d means that young people in these towns, which include areas of Tendring on the east coast and Blackpool and Liverpool to the west, are suffering disproportionately, often alone and with no help<\/a>, said the researchers who conducted the study.<\/p>\n Q&AWhat is the Against the tide series?Show<\/p>\n Over the next year, the Against the Tide project from the Guardian\u2019s Seascape team will be reporting on the lives of young people in coastal communities across England and Wales.<\/p>\n Young people in many of England’s coastal towns are disproportionately likely to face poverty, poor housing, lower educational attainment and employment opportunities than their peers in equivalent inland areas. In the most deprived coastal towns they can be left to struggle with crumbling and stripped back public services and transport systems that limit their life choices.<\/p>\n For the next 12 months, accompanied by documentary photographer Polly Braden, we will travel up and down the country to port towns, seaside resorts and former fishing villages to ask 16- to 25-year-olds to tell us about their lives and how they feel about the places they live.\u00a0<\/p>\n By putting their voices at the front and centre of our reporting, we want to examine what kind of changes they need to build the futures they want for themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n Thank you for your feedback.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t yet know why these young people are being left out but one reason might be that they are not demanding the help in the way the older generation is, or if they are, they are not having their voices heard,\u201d said Emily Murray, director of Essex University\u2019s centre for coastal communities<\/a>. The study found that the opposite is true for older people living in the same communities, who were a third less likely to have undiagnosed mental health problems than people the same age living inland in similar areas of deprivation.<\/p>\n The Essex researchers, led by Claire Wicks, studied data from 28,000 adults across the UK<\/a> to see how different generations experience life in Britain. They looked at the responses from adults living in coastal communities and inland in England between 2018 and 2023 who scored highly against a widely accepted measure of mental distress but where they had not had a diagnosis. Deprivation was determined using the official indices from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.<\/p>\n Four years ago, a report by England\u2019s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, found that diagnosed mental health problems were disproportionately higher among young people in coastal <\/a>areas.<\/p>\n