Teen mental health showed “some signs of progress” in 2023 after record-high levels of mental health challenges in 2021, concludes a new report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In 2023, 40 percent of high school students said they had experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year, according to the report. This is down from 42 percent in 2021, but it’s still “concerningly high” compared with a decade earlier when it was at 30 percent, according to the report.
The CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey report draws on survey data collected every two years among a nationally representative sample of U.S. high school students. The 2023 survey had more than 20,000 respondents and was conducted in the spring.
“Although these percentage decreases in mental health outcomes may seem small, they’re really important,” said Kathleen Ethier, the director of adolescent and school health for the CDC, in an interview. “It is really the first time we’ve seen these kinds of improvements in a number of years.”
Students’ worsening mental health over the past decade-plus—and especially since students returned to school buildings following pandemic closures—has been a top concern for schools in recent years, with teachers and other educators often on the front lines. Students’ declining mental health has prompted schools to invest in an array of mental health services and social- emotional learning curricula.
Anjali Verma, president of the National Student Council and an incoming 12th grader at a charter school in West Chester, Pa., said she is “optimistic that things are getting better societally to make sure that we’re working to support our students who are struggling.”
Kate King, the president of the National Association of School Nurses and a school nurse for Columbus City Schools in Ohio, attributes the decrease partly to the work schools have done in the past two years to support student mental health. By 2023, schools were back in person and had more funding for mental health resources, she said. Federal pandemic relief aid allowed many schools to hire counselors, social workers, and psychologists, or contract with outside mental health care providers. However, that relief aid will not be available to schools in the years ahead.
Girls and LGBTQ+ teens more likely to report mental health challenges
Girls and those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning (LGBTQ+) are still faring worse than boys and cisgender and heterosexual teens. Fifty-three percent of female students and 65 percent of LGBTQ+ students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the past year, compared with 28 percent of male students and 31 percent of cisgender and heterosexual students, the report found.
Those percentages are lower than in 2021, but they’re still higher than in 2013, according to the report.
When it comes to suicide, 20 percent of high school students seriously considered attempting suicide during the past year, 16 percent made a suicide plan, and 9 percent attempted suicide, the report found. Those percentages are also slightly down from 2021 but still concerning, according to the report.
LGBTQ+ students were more than three times as likely to report seriously considering attempting suicide compared with their peers; and girls were almost twice as likely to report the same as boys, the report found.
While it’s important to ensure girls and LGBTQ+ teens have the mental health support they need, it’s also important to fight the stigma of having mental health challenges among boys, Anjali said. She said it was interesting to see that boys are less likely to report mental health challenges even though CDC data from 2021 shows that the suicide rate among men was four times higher than among women.
“In mental health advocacy, especially in our teenage group, we really try and focus on men’s mental health, because there’s a lot of stigma with guys asking for help because they feel like they’re seen as ‘weak,’ when that couldn’t be further from the case,” Anjali said.
‘We have a long way to go’
The findings underscore that while teens’ mental health shows some progress, schools, parents, and communities need to continue providing resources to support teens, according to mental health advocates.
“We have a long way to go,” Ethier said. “There is still a great deal of work to be done to address the crisis in youth mental health, but the data can really give us some hope that when we come together, we put young people first, we do what is needed, we can see positive change.”
The CDC recommends that schools teach students to recognize signs of mental health challenges; promote mindfulness; promote social-emotional learning; enhance school connectedness; provide behavioral interventions; and support staff well-being.
The challenge for schools, though, is that federal pandemic aid is expiring this year. In some cases, schools are eliminating school-based health care positions because of the lack of funding, King said.
What schools could do, if they don’t have enough funding, is to free up qualified staff they already have—like school nurses and school psychologists—to spend more of their time providing mental health services to students rather than completing paperwork, King said. For instance, she said she has a lot of clerical responsibilities, and if she didn’t have those, it would free her up to provide students with more mental health support.
Schools could also do “a better job” educating all school staff on behavioral and mental health identification and intervention, King said.
Students themselves could be a powerful resource, Anjali said.
“Other students notice when their friends don’t show up to school, or they’re skipping practice for the fourth time that week, or they’re not going to their usual club or activity, or they’re not drawing in class like they usually do,” she said. Schools could train students to recognize when their peers might be having mental health challenges and what steps they need to follow so an adult becomes aware and can provide support.
At the end of the day, though, “schools are going to have to put money in,” King said. “It is a change in the thought process of valuing [school-based health care professionals] as an integral part, just as you would value having an expert 3rd grade reading teacher.”
