- A new report from the CDC shows nearly 60% of teenage girls feel persistently sad or hopeless.
- Their sadness rate is double that of teenage boys.
When asked, most teenage girls across the US will tell you: there have been times when they've felt so persistently sad, so hopeless, that they weren't able to go about life as usual for weeks on end.
That's according to stark new data released Monday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The number of high school girls who said they were persistently sad or hopeless soared to almost 60% over the 10 year period from 2011 to 2021, the agency said.
Reports of persistent sadness and hopelessness among teen girls are now double those of boys their age. The finding follows many years of increases in depression and suicidality among teen girls, which has led some to sound the alarm about an all-out mental health crisis among young women nationwide.
Experts on a CDC briefing call said there is no one thing that is single-handedly causing these increases, but rather that a complicated web of factors, including school stressors, social isolation prompted by the pandemic, as well as social media and the changing nature of how people interact with one another may all be contributing factors.
Nearly two in every three teen girls (57%) surveyed said "yes" when they were asked if, over the course of the last year, they'd ever felt "so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row" that they "stopped doing some usual activities." Only about one in three teen boys (29%) said the same.
The new CDC report, taken from a survey of more than 17,500 students across 152 US high schools, both public and private, said that trends of increasing persistent sadness and hopelessness applied to "large percentages of students across all racial and ethnic groups."
It is possible that boys simply don't report or express sadness in quite the same way that girls do: other recent CDC-funded research on adult men showed that many adult males who were clinically depressed never reported feeling hopeless, but instead said they felt angry, and acted irritably as a result.
But, there are tell-tale signs that a disparity in mental health between teen boys and teen girls is real. In addition to their escalating rates of sadness and hopelessness, teens girls were also more likely to say they'd considered suicide than teen boys:
And the percentage of teen girls who attempted suicide in 2021 was nearly double that of their male peers:
Young women are also reporting higher rates of sexual violence, and more forced sex
The increases in sadness and suicide ideation come at a time when more young women are also reporting troubling instances of sexual violence and forced sex.
Studies have shown that sexual violence and forced sex are associated with a wide array of mental health issues, as well as substance use, and long-term physical health issues.
Kathleen Ethier, who directs the CDC's Division of Adolescent and School Health said that the number of teen girls reporting ever being forced to have sex is a number that's been consistently high, hovering above 10% since 2011, but it jumped further between 2019 and 2021.
"14% of teen girls had been physically forced to have sex when they did not want to," she said during a call with reporters on Monday. "Think about what I just said: For every 10 teenage girls you know, at least one of them, and probably more, has been raped. This tragedy cannot continue."
Forced sex rates are especially high for Native students and for LGBTQ+ students, who also have some of the highest suicide rates in the country.
"High school should be a time for trailblazing, not trauma," Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC's acting principal deputy director, said in a release. "These data show our kids need far more support to cope, hope, and thrive."
The CDC recommends some evidence-based prevention and intervention efforts that teachers and mentors at school can use to help bolster students' mental health. Many of them are centered around fostering a sense of connectedness for teens at school, as well as more peer-to-peer support and autonomy and empowerment in learning.