Our Teenage Girls are in Trouble
- malimd
- Mar 24, 2023
- 3 min read
If you happen to have three teen daughters these days, how might their mental health look? According to recently reported CDC data, bleak.
In 2021, 57% of girls felt “persistently sad or hopeless.” And 30% seriously contemplated suicide. If your family was average, that would mean two of your girls were pretty depressed through the pandemic, and one of them was thinking a lot about killing herself. Please pause to consider these numbers. I started psychiatry training in 1998, and this is some of the most heart-wrenching data I have encountered.
Fom my work and my life experiences I can tell you, it rings true. Mothers bring in their middle school daughters who’ve started cutting their wrists or thighs, and add that “all her friends are doing the same.” And also: “what happened to my kid? She’s never happy any more.” These are awful things to hear, hour after hour, day after day. Parents are distraught.
What’s the picture like for boys by the way? Not great, but clearly less grim. Rates for serious mood symptoms and suicidal thoughts are about half the rates for girls. The American girl is struggling severely and uniquely.
It’s also worth looking at trends over time. A decade ago, our highschool girls answered yes to the same mood (36%) and suicide questions (19%) at markedly less disturbing rates. The crisis is now.
Is the pandemic to blame? Not entirely. It’s worsened the picture, but the trends were solidly in place before covid-19 was a word. Large annual surveys showed teen depression rates doubling in the decade ending 2019.
Some people wonder whether this is simply a case of girls today being more comfortable saying they are hurting. But our girls aren’t just saying that. They’re contemplating suicide, cutting themselves, attempting suicide, and showing up at emergency rooms. That sounds like both shouting for help, and giving up.
I am alarmed and hurt. Our surgeon general is in the same boat:
I’m in the camp pointing fingers at social media. For hours a day, our girls are glued to a screen, comparing, commenting, wishing, drooling, regreting, doubting, envying, trashing, trolling, justifying. Facebook was launched in 2004. YouTube in 2005. The first iphone was launched in 2007, and instagram in 2010. By 2011 we had Snapchat, and by 2016 TikTok. Check this out:
I’m a doctor. I’m not saying two overlapping timelines prove one event caused the other. But how our daughters spend their time, and who they spend it with, mostly certainly affects how they feel. Consider this: on average, teens spend over nine hours per day online, excluding homework. And over five hours on social media. When I ask them them how social media makes them feel, many are refreshingly honest. “Horrible.” But they feel powerless to do anything about it.
I haven’t even touched on abuse and exploitation yet. Look, I’ve been bullied in middle school. Cussed, mocked, tripped, tricked, threatened, sucker-punched, etc. It was lousy. Painful and humiliating. Wouldn’t wish it on my enemies. But with cyberbullying, the scope and intensity are far worse, the audience much wider, the pain more devastating. You don’t go home and escape for a bit. You go home, lock yourself in your room, and watch the shares and the comments explode.
And with all those hours spent online, what don’t our girls have time for any more? They’re not hanging out IRL (in real life) for one. Too many are lonely, isolated, and excluded. They’re not exercising, not getting fresh air and sunshine. Not working part-time jobs nearly as much. I grew up with hours and hours of real conversations with aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins, not to mention parents and friends. Many of these I still quote from. Most teens nowadays aren’t getting any of that.
You know what else they don’t have time for? They’re just not sleeping enough. Between electronics, and homework, academic pressures and social demands, they just can’t find the time. Circadian rhythms change at puberty, pushing the natural sleep time closer to midnight. And most schools start when teen brains are wired to sleep in. The result is a drove of zombies yawning through first period.
No actually, the results are far more sinister. Sleep deprivation alone is capable of wreaking havoc on teen’s mental health. It worsens depression and anxiety, attendance and grades, obesity and metabolic ailments. And it’s an awfully vicious cycle – stressed and unhappy teens can’t fall asleep. This combination is quite lethal too. Insomnia is an independent predictor of suicide.
Honestly, just reading over this post is pretty depressing. But let’s not bury our heads in the sand. There’s urgent work to be done, smart and creative solutions to apply. Even in these confusing times, the foundations of them are pretty basic stuff. More common sense and generational wisdom rather than rocket science. More courage and integrity by the adults “in charge.” And wider access to quality mental health care for our youth.
Further reading:
M. Ali, MD
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