What Will Be The Next “Black Swan” Event?

What will be the next Black Swan event? You know what I mean by “Black Swan event” don’t you? It’s a way of talking about something that we had not seen coming and that there were no models of prediction for.

At one time black swans did not exist. Until they did. It was a well known axiom in Europe that “All swans are white”. Well that was a standard philosophical answer a couple of centuries ago to demonstrate inductive reasoning and fallibility.

And it worked. It was great. Until Westerners arrived in Australia. Before their very eyes, something they had not predicted, that they assumed did no exist, did exist after all! And that upended their theories and demonstrations.

There they were, black swans! Hundreds of them! This writer is from Western Australia, one of the places that black swans inhabit. Black swans abound. And they will hiss and chase you if you go near their young. That’s a black swan event in itself.

We now use the tale in a cautionary way to say that we don’t see what is coming our way in terms of big cultural or social change. The last great black swan event we all experienced was, of course, the pandemic. Perhaps some immunologists and disease centres predicted it, but the COVID pandemic, and the resulting lockdowns caused chaos. Black Swan events upend everything because we’re not prepared for them.

It’s not just our plans and our holidays (or our assumption that toilet paper is supplied on tap) that gets upended however. Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that in 2020-2021, the percentage of young people 16-24 who said they were suffering from a mental health disorder was double the adult average. Nearly 1.21 million young people! That’s just under 40 per cent of their total number.

Now is this correlation or causation? Perhaps it’s a bit of both. An event that sideswiped many young people who were in the nascent stages of spreading their own wings in the world, had those very same wings clipped by a Black Swan event. The lockdowns, lack of schooling, uncertainty, isolation and loneliness, all contributed to what was already a major concern.

Leading into the pandemic, my wife observed in her own clinic a steady rise of anxiety issues among a younger cohort, and then saw it ramped up when she was on Telehealth consults over the following two years. Resilience levels were lower, anxiety levels were higher. And most of all, it was the fear that something else would be coming our way that no one could see. Everyday life no longer seemed as certain.

Of course there are other reasons by that figure of 40 per cent might be so high. We are, after all, a more therapeutically aware community, and younger generations have the language to describe their feelings more appropriately than many in the older generations do. But it is significant that many anxieties induced by the pandemic have stayed with people. Black Swan events have long tails.

And there is the issue of the online world and its effect on young people, particular the unfettered access to a smartphone and all that that entails. If you want to read a good book on this matter, then NYU professor, Jonathan Haidt, has a great one called The Anxious Generation. It’s worth a read.

Here’s the thing: we can’t predict the next Black Swan event. That’s the point. But in terms of resilience and coping strategies, prevention is a whole lot better, less intrusive, and less expensive across all sorts of indices, than the cure. Building such skills into our young people is a vital task of the mental health community, and at Life To The Full we are intent on helping our clients gain resilience, as well as enabling staff within community and education systems to be resilient themselves, and to help those they work alongside to be so as well.

So black swans do exist after all! I am as confident as that as I am that pink swans do not. Though maybe I should put a dollar each way on that!