Grow up about teens’ mental health
The data is terrifying. A staggering 42% of teenagers contacted for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s biannual Youth Risk Behavior Survey reported feeling “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” in the past year; 22% had “seriously considered” suicide in the past year.
The numbers for teen girls are worse: Nearly 60% of teenage girls experienced “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” in the previous year. Thirty percent of girls said they had seriously considered suicide. Eighteen percent said they’d experienced sexual violence, and 14% had been forced to have sex.
Meanwhile, almost 70% of LGBTQ+ teenagers reported hopelessness. Forty-five percent said they had considered ending their lives, with 37% saying they had actually made plans to do so.
The latest survey was conducted in the fall of 2021. Yet, blame for the crisis can’t be ascribed entirely to the coronavirus. To be sure, the pandemic made things worse — much worse, in many cases — but teens’ mental health was already failing before the arrival of COVID-19.
“Many measures were moving in the wrong direction before the pandemic,” said Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’S division of adolescent and school health. “These data show the mental health crisis among young people continues.”
Before the older generations chime in with a “kids these days” take on the softness of today’s youth, consider the fact that teens these days are dealing with issues their parents and grandparents never dreamed of. And frankly, it’s our fault.
There have been more than 150 school shootings that have involved injury or death since 2018, including a staggering 51 in 2022. Nary a week goes by without a scene of students fleeing from a school building being played on a continuous loop on the TV news. Adults seem incapable of — or uninterested in — stopping the carnage.
Social media brings its own pressures, with Instagram and Tiktok scrolling heightening body image issues and the general sense that your teenage mistakes can be captured on an iphone camera and broadcast to millions of viewers.
Climate change has many wondering what type of a planet they will inherit from their elders.
And yes, COVID-19.
“It’s the perfect recipe for the worst kind of stressor,” Mitchell Prinstein, an adolescent development expert and chief science officer of the American Psychological Association, told CNN.
Adults are only making things worse, failing to adequately address the school shooting crisis, passing laws that target LGBTQ+ youth, and ignoring global warming.
Congress has taken some small steps, setting aside $500 million for schoolbased mental health services in the 2022 gun safety and mental health services law. Another $240 million will fund mental health awareness initiatives and improved detection of youth mental health issues.
That’s a good start, but addressing the issue requires more than money. It requires actual commitment on the part of adults. There will never truly be an end to this crisis until students aren’t going to class every day wondering if they are safe from gun violence or losing educational time training to avoid a gunman.
Transgender youths will never feel safe until lawmakers stop trying to legislate them out of existence, young women until their body autonomy is respected.