Syrenite Hewson is 18 years old, and has not had a decent night’s sleep since March.
“I go to bed and I stare at the ceiling for three hours,” she said.
“I’ve never had anything like this happen to me. It’s just really weird. This is what isolation and losing my job has done.”
Before the pandemic, Syrenite had a clear plan for 2020 — to finish year 12, and her second year of a hairdressing apprenticeship, on her way to buying her first house in her early 20s.
In a matter of days, she had been made redundant by her salon in Warrnambool, in country Victoria, and was stuck in her bedroom — isolated and extremely anxious.
“It was just the fact that a lot just changed at once. It was quite scary,” she said.
“It was fear of getting the disease, fear of not being able to find work — and the fact that my schooling was suffering because of my issues with sleeping.”
Those fears for the future — particularly around the job market — are a constant thread in the responses of young Australians to the ABC’s Generation COVID Project.
‘The frontline of COVID-19 is young people’
They are the first generation to go through a crisis of this magnitude since World War II.
They have already borne the brunt of the job losses: 44 per cent of the jobs that have disappeared this year belonged to 15 to 24-year-olds.
The impact on their mental health has also been huge — with sharp rises in anxiety, depression, and demand on mental health services like Headspace.
Professor Janeen Baxter, a leading social scientist