Teen girls reporting record levels of sadness
Nearly three in five teenage girls felt persistent sadness in 2021, double the rate of boys, and one in three girls seriously considered attempting suicide, according to data released Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The findings, based on surveys given to teenagers across the country, also showed high levels of violence, depression and suicidal thoughts among lesbian, gay and bisexual youth. More than one in five of these students reported attempting suicide in the year before the survey, the agency found.
The rates of sadness are the highest reported in a decade, reflecting a long-brewing national tragedy only made worse by the isolation and stress of the pandemic.
“I think there's really no question what this data is telling us,” said Dr. Kathleen Ethier, head of the CDC's Adolescent and School Health Program. “Young people are telling us that they are in crisis.”
While the CDC survey data are not broken down by state, other data document the youth mental health crisis in California.
According to the California Health Interview Survey, which was led by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, one-third of the state's middle and high school students experienced severe psychological distress between 2019 and 2021.
In 2020, youth suicides in California shot up by 20%, according to the California Health and Human Services Agency. And more than 284,000 youth cope with major depression across the state, according to the governor's office — 66% of whom do not receive treatment.
The Youth Risk Behavior Survey was given to 17,000 adolescents at high schools across the United States in the fall of 2021. The survey is conducted every two years, and the rates of mental health problems have gone up with every report since 2011, Ethier said.
“There was a mental health crisis before the pandemic — it just didn't catch everyone's attention the way it does now,” said Dr. Cori Green, the director of behavioral health education and integration in pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City.
Still, Green said that she is seeing more of her young patients test positive on screenings for depression. “The pandemic led to more social isolation — a risk factor for depression,” she said.
She also pointed out that depression symptoms sometimes manifest differently in boys and girls, which might not be fully reflected in the survey. Although girls with depression often have persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, which the survey asked about, boys with depression often exhibit irritability or aggression, she said.
On a handful of topics, the survey results suggested teenagers were doing better than in previous years. They reported lower rates of illicit drug use and bullying at school, for example.
And teenagers are having less sex, with fewer sexual partners, than in previous years.
But about 57% of girls and 69% of gay, lesbian or bisexual teenagers reported feeling sadness every day for at least two weeks during the previous year. And 14% of girls, up from 12% in 2011, said they had been forced to have sex at some point in their lives, as did 20% of gay, lesbian or bisexual adolescents.
“When we're looking at experiences of violence, girls are experiencing almost every type of violence more than boys,” said Ethier of the CDC. Researchers should be studying not only the increase in reports of violence, she said, but its causes: “We need to talk about what's happening with teenage boys that might be leading them to perpetrate sexual violence.”
Suicide prevention group The Trevor Project found that 44% of California's LGBTQ+ youth seriously considered suicide during the past year, including 54% of transgender and nonbinary youth.
Lishaun Francis, the senior director of behavioral health at Oakland-based non-profit Children Now, said kids have been stressed by the pandemic.
“For some children, the pandemic introduced new stressors for them — isolation, grief, if they lost a family member because of COVID,” Francis said. “For other children, there were already existing stressors that they dealt with on a regular basis, like if home life wasn't that good, for example … and the pandemic compounded those things.”
Lishaun also noted that “social media is definitely part of this story,” particularly for girls, and that for LGBTQ+ kids, national controversy over transgender issues “is reaching the ears of our young people and impacting their mental health.”
The researchers also analyzed the data by race and ethnicity, finding that Black and Hispanic students were more likely to report skipping school because of concerns about violence. White students, however, were more likely to report experiencing sexual violence.
The increase in sadness and hopelessness was reported across all racial groups over the past decade. Although Black students were less likely to report these negative feelings than other groups, they were more likely to report suicide attempts than white, Asian or Hispanic adolescents.
The 2021 survey asked about students' sexual orientation but did not ask about their gender identity, so data on risk factors for transgender students is not available.
The CDC survey follows another bleak report released by the agency last week showing that suicide rates were up among younger Americans and people of color after a twoyear decline.