Lebanon’s youth need a reason to stay

Lebanon is a young country. Roughly 44 percent of its population of six million people are under the age of 24, a demographic that should represent the country's greatest long-term asset. Instead, a recent UNICEF survey of 18-to-29-year-olds paints a picture of a generation absorbing crisis after crisis, with resilience increasingly standing in for opportunity that simply isn't there.

The numbers behind the exhaustion

The scale of the pressure is stark. According to the survey, 95.4 percent of young respondents said they feel sad or depressed at least sometimes, a figure UNICEF frames as the psychological residue of years of overlapping crises, financial strain, and repeated trauma. Even before the most recent escalation, the structural ground beneath young Lebanese was unstable, in 2022, youth unemployment stood at 47.8 percent, more than double the national rate, and roughly one-third of young women were neither working nor engaged in education or training.

Education, historically one of Lebanon's most reliable institutions, is buckling under the same pressure. Only 22.2 percent of surveyed young people are currently attending school or university, with financial barriers cited as the primary obstacle. More than four in five said they cannot afford the cost of school or university at all, and roughly 80 percent identified cash assistance as their single most urgent need.

These pressures compound. Economic hardship limits access to education; interrupted education narrows employment prospects; unemployment deepens psychological strain; and instability layers on top of all of it, reinforcing a cycle that, without intervention, simply repeats itself for the next cohort.

Yet the survey's most striking finding may be its most hopeful, while more than half of respondents said they intend to migrate, around 69 percent said they would choose to stay in Lebanon if conditions improved. This is a generation waiting for a reason to remain.

The psychological meaning

To understand what these numbers mean psychologically, The Beiruter spoke with psychologist Dr. Tia Rahme.

Rahme explained the 95.4 percent figure reporting sadness or depression, “that number should stop everyone reading it. When you're talking about the overwhelming majority of an age cohort reporting emotional distress, you're looking at a population-level response to sustained, unresolved instability. This is an entirely rational response to an irrational set of circumstances."

She drew a distinction between resilience and wellbeing that she felt often gets collapsed in public conversation. "We love to praise young Lebanese for their strength, and it's genuinely remarkable. But it is not the same thing as being okay. Strength allows continuing to function under conditions that would break most systems. It doesn't mean the underlying toll isn't accumulating. I worry that praising them without addressing the conditions that demand it becomes its own kind of neglect."

On the interconnection between unemployment, interrupted education, and psychological strain, Rahme pointed to a concept she called "foreclosed identity." "Adolescence and early adulthood are supposed to be when someone experiments, fails safely, and builds an identity around competence and future possibility. When 47.8 percent of your peers can't find work and you can't afford tuition, that developmental process gets foreclosed. People are forced into an identity of survival before they've had the chance to develop an identity of aspiration. That has long psychological consequences even after the economic conditions eventually improve."

She was especially struck by the gap between migration intent and the 69 percent who said they'd stay if conditions improved. "Psychologically, that statistic tells you these young people haven't given up on attachment to their home. Wanting to leave isn't the same as wanting to be somewhere else, often it's wanting relief from an environment that no longer meets basic needs. The fact that the majority say they'd stay under better conditions suggests the bond to Lebanon is still intact. What's broken is the infrastructure around them."

Rahme was keen on the importance of support and therapy, “mental health support matters, and it's listed as a need in this survey for good reason. But you cannot therapy your way out of structural unemployment or an unaffordable education system. Psychological intervention without economic and educational intervention treats the symptom while leaving the cause untouched. If you want this generation's mental health to genuinely improve, the far more effective intervention is addressing the material conditions producing the distress in the first place."

What emerges from the UNICEF data, and from Rahme's reading of it is a portrait of a generation still waiting to be given a reason not to leave. The psychological toll is real and measurable, but so, apparently, is the attachment underneath it. As Rahme put it, closing the conversation, "The data isn't telling us these young people are lost. It's telling us they're still here, still hoping, and still asking whether anyone is going to meet them halfway."