Youth is not what it used to be. On both sides of the Atlantic, whether it is the share of teenagers who consider themselves failures or the percentage who are hospitalised for self-harm, young people’s mental health is in freefall. The numbers here are not disputed; since 2012, levels of anxiety and depression have skyrocketed. What had been disputed is why this was happening.
Earlier this year, the partial release of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) biannual Youth Risk Behavior Survey in the US showed that most teen girls (57 per cent) now say they experience persistent sadness or hopelessness (up from 36 per cent in 2011), and 30 per cent of teen girls say that they have seriously considered suicide (up from 19 per cent in 2011). Boys are doing badly too, but their reported rates of depression and anxiety are not as high, and their increases since 2011 are smaller. The big surprise in the CDC data is that the Covid-19 pandemic didn’t really affect the overall trends, which marched on as they have since around 2012. Teens were already socially distanced by 2019, which might explain why Covid restrictions added little to their rates of mental illness, on average. (Of course, many individuals suffered greatly.)
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