Teen girls are in a state of despair, according to the Centers for Disease Control. A new report from the agency, based on data collected by the Youth Risk Behavior Survey conducted in 2021, finds that teenagers overall are in a state of desperation, with increases in debilitating sadness, violence and suicidal ideation.
The survey, which the CDC conducts once every two years, questioned 17,000 high school students from across the country, asking them to report on their own mental health and behavior. In a few respects, the news is good, pointing to the success of some public health interventions aimed at teens: kids are less likely to take drugs than they have been in previous decades, for example, and fewer of them are having unprotected sex.
But the report’s findings on mental health paint a disturbing picture of American youth in a state of emotional catastrophe. Compared with pre-pandemic levels, teenagers are more likely to experience persistent feelings of distress or malaise that interfere in their lives. They are more likely to think about suicide and more likely to attempt it. They are more likely, too, to report experiences of interpersonal violence – from bullying online and at school, to being threatened or hurt with weapons, to fear of violence that keeps them form leaving their homes, to sexual assault and rape. “There is no question from this data that young people are telling us that they are in crisis,” Kathleen Ethier, the CDC’s director for adolescent and school health, told NPR.
Schools are among the few places where American teens are able to access mental health services, and the report suggests a recommitment to school-based interventions as part of the solution – though school counseling budgets are already stretched thin, and outside resources are prohibitively expensive and overbooked. The report’s emphasis on schooling has led some outlets to speculate that the pandemic, with its added stress and uncertainty and long quarantine periods that kept children away from school resources, may have contributed to the increase in mental health problems.
But the stark gender breakdown in the data suggests that a meaningful solution to the teen mental health crisis might have to be political, rather than bureaucratic. That’s because in nearly every measure, girls are faring dramatically worse than boys. Girls are experiencing higher rates of depression and hopelessness: a staggering 57% of girls report depression symptoms, compared with 29% of boys. Girls are more likely to drink alcohol and use opioids, along with other recreational drugs. And girls are more than twice as likely to report having seriously considered ending their lives: 30% of girls report serious suicidal ideation, compared with 14% of boys. For girls, the rate of suicidal thoughts has ballooned by 60% over the past decade.
Most disturbingly, girls are reporting an often dramatic increase in the rate of violence they are experiencing. “When we’re looking at experiences of violence, girls are experiencing almost every type of violence more than boys,” Dr Ethier told the New York Times. This includes kinds of threats and bullying that need not be gender-specific. But the teen girls surveyed also report being targeted for sexual violence at an alarmingly increased rate. Eighteen per cent said that they had experienced sexual violence within the past year, up by 20% since 2017. And 14% of teen girls reported having been raped – a figure that has increased by a horrifying 27% since the survey was last conducted in 2019.
The trend extends across all racial groups, but some girls are faring worse than others: the data indicates that American Indian and Alaska Native girls experience the highest rates of both suicidality and sexual violence. LGBQ+ teens, too – of all genders – are experiencing alarmingly high levels of violence and mental health problems (the survey uses LGBQ+ because it did not ask about gender identity). But unlike the rise in emotional distress and experiences of abuse among teen girls, this problem is not new – queer teens have been treated this way for a long time.
These are not issues that can be solved by simply hiring more guidance counselors. They will require cultural shifts – ones that the United States, and many of its most influential policymakers, have been unwilling to initiate – that will discourage boys and grown men from attacking and raping these girls, and punish those who do.
This better world, one that inflicts less violence on women and girls and endows them with more dignity, does not seem to be forthcoming. Since the survey was conducted, in 2021, Roe v Wade has been overturned; public schools and colleges have become pawns in the cynical culture war plays of the right; a backlash to #MeToo has left sexual abuse as culturally accepted and institutionally entrenched as ever. Maybe it is no surprise that LGBQ+ teens and teenage girls are now facing such high degrees of violence and psychic distress: the reinforcement of gender conformity and gender hierarchy, through both violence and the law, has rapidly become the focal point of our politics. Today, teen girls are looking out at a country that values their talents and ambitions less than their breeding capacity, values their individuality less than its own fears, and refuses to take the necessary steps to make their lives better.
The mental health crisis among teen girls is an emergency, one that is worsening. Their suffering will not abate until we, American adults, make a world that is more worthy of them, and give them lives of prosperity and hopefulness – that is, we need to give them a more hopeful future and a country that is worthy of them.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 988 and online chat is also available. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. You can call even if you don’t have credit on your mobile. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
