The cohort of young people currently aged 17 to 19, transitioning into early adulthood, has endured a series of structural, political, and ecological shocks that few generations before them have faced in such rapid succession.

Within a mere decade of life, this demographic has navigated a fractured education system, experienced the trauma of mass political violence, and borne the brunt of infrastructural collapse during climate disasters. While social and political rhetoric frequently glorifies their resilience, a fundamental question remains unaddressed: who will take responsibility for the psychological burnout of these young souls?

The vulnerabilities of this generation began early. In 2020, when these individuals were barely 10 years old, the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly disrupted their foundational years. The sudden transition to poorly organised online learning and hybrid education modules fractured their socialisation. For a developing child, the classroom is not merely a site of rote academic instruction; it is a vital ecosystem for psychological development. The isolation of the pandemic, compounded by the anxiety of a global health crisis, left deep emotional scars that the education system failed to heal.

Instead of receiving systemic healing, this cohort became the lab rats of a constantly revised and ethically questionable national curriculum. A glaring manifestation of this institutional failure is evident in the current NCTB textbook, English for Today for Classes Nine and Ten. Under Unit One (“Sense of Self”), Lesson 2, the curriculum introduces Jamaica Kincaid’s powerful short story “Girl.” The story is a brilliant piece of satire, using relentless maternal instructions to critique the oppressive, rigid domestic standards forced upon women.

While including Kincaid is a progressive curricular choice, the subsequent practice and analysis sections reveal profound institutional rigidity. The textbook instructs students to respond to a prompt stating that biological attributes make a person act as a man or a woman in society, which creates gender identity and discrimination.

Students are then asked to categorise tasks into “man’s job” and “woman’s job.” This formulation suffers from severe conceptual vagueness, failing to delineate where biology ends and social conditioning begins. By utilising the phrase “makes a person act,” the text enforces a crude biological determinism. For a maturing adolescent experiencing rapid bodily changes, this message is highly anxiety-inducing, falsely teaching them that their anatomy locks them into a rigid social destiny.

Furthermore, by framing discrimination as a direct, natural by-product of biology rather than a historical and social construct, the text fatalistically implies that societal inequality is unchangeable. For teenagers who do not fit traditional moulds, this framework induces shame, alienates them from their changing bodies, and crushes individual agency. The activities fail to touch upon the core themes of the story, such as the mother’s internalised anxiety regarding societal policing and the label of a “slut.” Consequently, teachers in secondary schools actively skip or avoid the lesson entirely, leaving students to navigate these complex anxieties without guidance.

Beyond the classroom, this generation has been thrust into profound political turmoil. They were the active apparatus of the July Uprising, stepping into a vacuum of governance to manage civil duties. We saw both school and college students bravely managing traffic, maintaining civic order, and cleaning the streets. Yet behind these stoic, brave faces lies immense unaddressed trauma.

These teenagers witnessed the deaths of peers just slightly older than them. While political figures and society glorify their bravery, there is a total absence of discourse surrounding their mental rehabilitation. The psychological toll of witnessing state-sponsored violence and losing friends cannot be erased by romanticising their courage. This trauma builds upon prior events, such as the profound impact of the Milestone College plane crash on younger students, creating a cumulative state of hypervigilance.

This institutional apathy becomes physically visible during public examinations amid severe climate emergencies. The nation is battling heavy monsoon rains, flash floods, and landslides, and we witness the distressing sight of adolescents entering waterlogged Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC) examination venues. Images abound of students falling through broken, submerged footpaths as they try to support one another, their admit cards and uniforms drenched, arriving at the examination halls shivering.

This year, during the Secondary School Certificate (SSC) examinations in Comilla, students sat in flooded classrooms, while in Begumganj, Noakhali, a student was severely injured when a loose ceiling fan fell directly onto his head during an active examination session. Even as they enter university, the pattern persists: university buses stall in deep, clogged floodwaters, forcing students to be rescued on rickshaw vans, huddled together under umbrellas, trying to shield their books from the rain.

The prevailing national narrative surrounding these incidents is deeply toxic. They routinely frame these hurdles as a testament to the “dedication and resilience” of our youth, even though certain political leaders demeaned their suffering, claiming they had to endure tougher experiences than this during their public examinations. This rhetoric is a dangerous smoke screen. It shrouds systemic negligence and institutional apathy in the language of praise, glorifying the suffering of young minds rather than fixing the broken infrastructure that endangers them.

This romanticised veil of resilience is completely shattered when confronted with empirical reality. According to data collected by the Aachol Foundation, an organisation dedicated to mental health awareness and suicide prevention, in their study titled Student Suicides: A Growing Crisis, the psychological fractures within this generation are turning fatal. Student suicides nationwide rose sharply from 310 in 2024 to 403 in 2025. At the college level, 92 students died by suicide, representing 22.8 per cent of the total. Just this July, two HSC candidates in Rajshahi and Mymensingh have taken their own lives, driven to final despair by acute mental distress surrounding their examinations.

When mapped against this grim reality, the traditional political narrative, which views students through an archaic, demeaning gaze that dictates they must be disciplined, coerced, and constantly kept in line through fear and over-regulation, reveals its ultimate, dangerous futility. Attempting to manage an already traumatised, hypervigilant generation through punitive measures is a catastrophic miscalculation. It is a profoundly faulty assumption for political leaders to believe they can dignify or sculpt a student’s life-altering milestones by piling on unyielding institutional pressure and systemic fear. It is impossible to scare a generation into compliance when they are already drowning in unaddressed grief and anxiety.

Bangladesh cannot afford an emotionally burnt-out future. We urgently need policymakers and a leadership framework that looks beyond metrics of economic productivity and political utility. We urgently need leaders who understand the cultural and social realities of these undeniably brilliant, creative, and brave young souls. We need policymakers who genuinely care about this young demographic’s psychological well-being. Without a systematic, empathetic mental health infrastructure and structural reforms in education and safety, we are exploiting our youth. They have never failed to take a moral stand when the country needed them; it is time the country stopped failing them.

Zarin Tasnim is a Lecturer at the Department of Media, Communication, and Journalism at North South University and an assistant director at the Public Relations Office (PRO).