Teen girls reported record levels of violence, sadness, and thoughts of suicide in 2021, experiencing distress at twice the rate of teen boys, according to new federal data released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The nearly three in five teen girls who felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021 was a 60% increase compared to a decade earlier. The increase in sadness and hopelessness was reported across all racial groups over the last decade. In 30 years of collecting similar data, “we’ve never seen this kind of devastating, consistent findings,” said Kathleen Ethier, director of CDC’s adolescent and school health division. “There’s no question young people are telling us they are in crisis. The data really call on us to act.”
