This week, Myndigheten för vård- och omsorgsanalys, the Swedish government agency tasked with independently evaluating the country’s healthcare system, published its latest national follow-up “Nationell uppföljning av hälso- och sjukvården 2026”. The report tracks the quality, equity, and efficiency of Swedish healthcare over a ten-year period through 2025, drawing on national indicators, a large population survey, and comparisons with other countries.
One finding stands out in particular: young adults aged 18–29 now report the lowest quality of life of any age group in Sweden, apart from those over 80, and for a very different reason. Where older adults’ scores are shaped by physical health, young adults’ are shaped almost entirely by anxiety and low mood. It’s a striking data point from a group central to the work we and our portfolio organizations do every day, and we wanted to share what stood out, and why it resonates with the broader picture we’re seeing across our portfolio.
A different shape of wellbeing across life stages
This pattern is echoed in newer Swedish research cited in the report, which finds that young adults report lower life satisfaction, less sense of meaning, and higher rates of loneliness, depression, and anxiety than older generations, while older Swedes report comparatively strong wellbeing and social connection. Interestingly, the same research notes that young adults remain optimistic about their own futures, even as their current wellbeing lags behind, a combination researchers link to high ambition and the influence of social media.
Why Sweden no longer fits the classic “U-curve” of happiness
For decades, researchers studying wellbeing across the lifespan have described a fairly consistent pattern known as the “U-curve” of happiness: life satisfaction is high in early adulthood, dips through the middle years, often linked to career and family pressures and then rises again in later life. It’s a pattern that has shown up repeatedly across countries and decades, to the point of becoming a kind of standard assumption in wellbeing research.
The Swedish data cited in this report suggests that pattern no longer holds. Newer Swedish research (Bittár et al. 2026) finds that young adults now report markedly worse outcomes than older adults across nearly every dimension measured, not just a dip before an eventual recovery, but consistently lower scores on life satisfaction, sense of meaning, and financial security, alongside notably higher rates of loneliness, depression, and anxiety. Older Swedes, meanwhile, report some of the strongest wellbeing of any age group when compared internationally, with closer relationships and less loneliness than their younger counterparts. Rather than a curve that bends back upward with age, the data describes something closer to a steady climb, young adulthood as the low point, not a temporary dip on the way to it.
The same research notes that the gap between age groups is now larger than the gaps linked to gender or country of birth, traditionally two of the more closely studied sources of variation in wellbeing research. That reframes this less as one demographic detail among many, and more as one of the more significant fault lines in how Swedes experience their lives today.
How young adults experience the healthcare system
The report also looks at how different age groups experience the care they receive. A few patterns stand out for 18–39-year-olds specifically:
They are somewhat less likely than other age groups to feel their healthcare needs have been fully met, and somewhat less likely to rate their care experience, how involved and respected they feel in decisions about their own care, as positive. They are also more likely than older adults to have, at some point, chosen not to seek care they might have benefited from, even though overall access to care doesn’t differ much by age. The report suggests this may partly reflect that younger people bring higher expectations to their encounters with the healthcare system, shaping how those encounters are experienced and reported.
These findings add a valuable, independent data point to a conversation many of us are already having: how do we support young people’s mental health and wellbeing as they move through education and into working life? The report doesn’t offer easy answers, but it does offer something useful, a clear, national, government-backed signal that this life stage deserves specific attention, both in how care is designed and in how workplaces, education systems, and communities support young people more broadly.
This is very much in line with what we’ve seen across our portfolio: organizations working on early intervention, youth mental health, and inclusive transitions into working life are addressing a real and measurable gap. We’ll continue to draw on findings like these as we shape our own initiatives.
