A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that American teens’ reports of symptoms of mental illness have skyrocketed over the past decade (Image courtesy of Sunstone Care).
ATLANTA, GA – Lawmakers in Washington, D.C. and Salt Lake City have both expressed concerns about the impact of social media on teenagers, especially young girls.
On Feb. 13, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) here finally released a report that confirms that those concerns are deadly serious.
The findings of a CDC 10-year survey of young people were not good.
That study found that teen girls who experienced persistent feelings of hopelessness or sadness skyrocketed between 2011 and 2021. They reported symptoms of poor mental health and increased thoughts of suicide, the latter being particularly high among students who identified as being LGBTQ.
Over the past decade, the percentage of students reporting having considered suicide, making plans to harm themselves or attempting suicide have increased so much that public health experts and advocates have began calling on the Biden administration to declare teen mental health a national emergency.
The independent U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has also recommended that all teens be regularly screened for depression and anxiety.
The concerns of both federal and state legislators have mostly been focused on the negative impact of social media on teen mental health.
In his annual State of the State address in January, Gov. Spencer Cox threw down the gauntlet to social media companies, demanding they provide parental controls and minimum age requirements for users.
President Joe Biden also called on Congress to do “more on mental health, especially for our children” during his State of the Union address in early February.
After much debate during the ongoing legislative session, however, most Utah lawmakers seem inclined to believe that attempts to legislate those changes would be unenforceable.
While the CDC has stopped short of attributing the growing mental health crisis to any particular causes, advocates for new legislation insist that the proliferation of cell phones and social media platforms in the past decade are entirely too coincidental to ignore.
As part of its Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary and Trends Report, the CDC 10-year study showed that teen girls experienced worse outcomes than boys.
More than half (about 57 percent) of teen girls reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless in 2021, up from 36 percent in 2011.
Only 29 percent of teen boys reported similar feelings in 2021, compared to 21 percent in 2011.
Thirty percent of female students reported “seriously considering” suicide and 24 percent made a suicide plan in 2021.
The CDC study found that teenage girls also frequently reported ditching school because they feared bullying – either online or in-person – and being forced to have sex.
In 2021, nearly 20 percent of female students reported experiencing sexual violence.
While the CDC report showed increases in the percentage of student sadness across all racial and ethnic lines, mental health problems are especially acute for certain minority groups and LGBTQ students.
Hispanic and multiracial students experienced feeling of being persistently sad or hopeless at higher rates than their Asian, African-American and Caucasian peers.
African-American students were more likely to attempt suicide, however, than their Asian, Hispanic and Caucasian teenagers.
Almost 70 percent of LGBTQ students reported experiencing feeling of sadness or hopelessness in 2021 and 20 percent reported attempting suicide.
One bright spot in the report was that CDC analysts said that the percentage of teens who actually succeed in taking their own lives did not increase in the past decade.
The CDC experts also commended Congress for recent steps taken to expand mental health programming.
Among those steps was the 117th Congress appropriating $500 million for the school-based mental health services grant program in 2022 and $240 million to fund mental health awareness and to detect youth mental health issues over four years.
Congress also provided $150 million for implementation of the three-digit 988 Suicide and Crisis lifeline.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the nation’s leading science-based, data-driven, service organization that protects the public’s health.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is an independent, volunteer panel of national experts in disease prevention and evidence-based medicine.
The task force works to improve the health of people nationwide by making evidence-based recommendations about clinical preventive services.